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THE REALM OF ENDS 

OR 

PLURALISM AND THEISM 



CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

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C. F. CLAY, Manager 




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All rights reserved 



THE REALM OF ENDS 

OR 

PLURALISM AND THEISM 



THE GIFFORD LECTURES 

DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF St ANDREWS 

IN THE YEARS 1907-10 



BY 



JAMES WARD, 

SC.D. (CAMB.), HON. LL.D. (EDIN.), HON. D.SC. (OXON.), 

FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY 

AND OF THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, 

PROFESSOR OF MENTAL PHILOSOPHY, CAMBRIDGE 



Cambridge : 

at the University Press 

191 1 



<i>v\< 






All tended to mankind, 
And man produced, all has its end thus far : 
But in completed man begins anew 
A tendency to God. Browning. 

Aber die erkannten thatsachlichen Verhaltnisse konnen allein unsere 
Gedanken nach diesem Mittelpunkte der Welt wenigstens convergiren 
machen. Lotze. 



mn 



PREFACE 

THESE lectures are intended to serve as a sequel 
to the course delivered in the University of 
Aberdeen some ten years previously. If at that time 
I had foreseen that I should presently be favoured 
with the opportunity to lecture on the Realm of Ends 
or Pluralism and Theism I might well have entitled 
the earlier lectures the Realm of Nature or Naturalism 
and Agnosticism. There my endeavour was to establish 
the priority of the idealistic, or — as it seems clearer to 
say — the spiritualistic standpoint ; and here I have tried 
to ascertain what we can know, or reasonably believe, 
concerning the constitution of the world, interpreted 
throughout and strictly in terms of Mind. 

At the outset, this world immediately confronts us 
not as one Mind, nor even as the manifestation of one, 
but as an objective whole in which we discern many 
minds in mutual interaction. It is from this pluralistic 
standpoint that our experience has in fact developed, 
and it is here that we acquire the ideas that eventually 
lead us beyond it. For pluralism, though empirically 
warranted, we find defective and unsatisfactory : but 



vi Preface 

the theism to which it points is only an ideal — an ideal 
however that, as both theoretically and practically 
rational, may claim our faith though it transcend our 
knowledge. Such is a meagre outline of the present 
lectures. The summary contained in the last of them 
may take the place of further prefatory detail. 

The two lectures on Hegel (Lectures VII and 
VIII) are, it must be confessed, largely a digression. 
It was my intention to treat of Kant's philosophy in 
like manner — in both cases in order to substantiate the 
contention that anyhow, avowedly or not, pluralism is 
the starting point of speculation. But on second 
thoughts I felt that perhaps I had already done too 
much. 

In Lectures XIX, XX I have embodied portions 
of a paper, entitled Faith and Science, read before the 
Synthetic Society in 1902. This has already appeared 
in a volume of that Society's papers privately reprinted 
by the Rt Hon. A. J. Balfour in 1909. 

The preparation and delivery of these lectures were 
frequently interrupted by an illness that began soon 
after my appointment and continued till its close. 
I desire to take this occasion to thank the Senatus 
of the University of St Andrews for their extreme 
patience and forbearance then and since ; and I can- 
not but rejoice that now at last these lectures, all 
defective though they be, are through this indulgence 
out of my hands. 



Preface vii 

I have still to express my obligations to generous 
friends : first, and especially, to Professor J. S. Mackenzie 
of Cardiff both for his long and careful criticisms and 
for the arduous work which he kindly undertook of 
reading through all the proofs ; again to Professor 
G. F. Stout of St Andrews for many valuable 
and astute comments ; and finally to my colleague, 
Professor W. R. Sorley, not only for his literary help 
but for his continuous encouragement throughout my 
labours. 

JAMES WARD. 



Trinity College, Cambridge. 
September, 191 1. 



CONTENTS 

PART I. : PLURALISM. 
Lecture I. Introductory. 

PAGES 

The Realm of Nature and the Realm of Ends, the mechanical and the 
moral, as contrasted ' aspects ' of the one world. Naturalism holds 

the former, Spiritualism the latter, to be fundamental . . . i — 3 
Summary of the Spiritualistic position as argued in the writer's previous 
Gifford Lectures. The recognition of Experience as a duality in 

unity tends to Spiritualistic Monism ...... 4 — 13 

This, if sound, ought to furnish the interpretation of the reality underlying 
the phenomena that science formulates. Rise of the Historical 

Method and the passing of 'Physical Realism' .... 13 — 18 

The idea of the Good and the course of History 18 — 20 

Pampsychism ........... 20 — 21 

The problem of the One and the Many, and the question of method . 21 — 24 

Lecture II. The One and the Many. 

What sort of unity does the world imply? (1) Nature as objective not 
the One ........... 

(2) Nor a Supreme Subject, taken alone ...... 

(3) Nor the unity of Subject and Object, as Absolute Self- conscious- 
ness. The One and Acosmism. The One of Mysticism 

The World-Soul of Platonism useless as a mediating principle 

Absolute Object, Absolute Subject, Absolute Self-consciousness, all alike 

unreal because reached by abstraction . . . . . . 36 — 41 

What sort of unity is possible without absolutely transcending the Many? 
The oscillations of theology and speculation between Pluralism and 
Singularism ........... 41 — 47 

The start from Pluralism 48 

Lecture III. Pluralism. 

Pluralism as a recoil from Absolutism now in the ascendant. Its stand- 
point and main features to be here described ..... 49 — 50 

The standpoint is throughout the historical, and the behaviour of indi- 
viduals bent on self- conservation and betterment its leading idea. 
Leibniz's Monadology still the type 50—54 



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x Contents 

PAGES 

The pluralistic outlook illustrated from Economics, Bionomics and 

Physionomics 54 — 59 

Can the so-called inanimate world be regarded in this fashion? Stationary 
states, persistent types and inertia. ' Elective affinities.' ' No two 
indiscernible individuals.' The principle of Continuity. Uniformity 

and statistics. The pluralisms conclusion ..... 59 — 67 

Purposive Activity and Orderliness ....... 67 — 69 

Lecture IV. The Contingency in the World. 

Chaos a myth, yet orderliness and regularity the result of conduct, not its 

presupposition .......... 70 — 72 

Natura naturans and Natura naturata ....... 72 — 75 

Causal Efficiency and Causal Connexion ; Chance and Contingency ; 

Subjective Selection. ' Heterogony of Ends ' .... 75 — 80 
Illustrations of contingency in the useful arts and in Nature. Fixity of 

Type and Variety of Conditions. The Grotesque in Nature . . 80 — 87 

* Worth ' and the natural ' Right to live ' 87—89 

Contingency of Species ; the gulf between Man and Brute ; Contingency 

and Individuals .......... 87 — 94 

Contingency in the so-called physical world ...... 94 — 96 

Lecture V. Evolution as Epigenesis and Equilibration. 

Pluralism implies epigenesis or new formation not literal evolution or 

preformation .......... 97 — 101 

Epigenesis entails new properties which its component factors did not 

, previously possess — hence it has been called ' creative synthesis ' . 101 — 105 

The prime source of this synthesis lies for the pluralist in the activity 
of experients. Organization the result of experience. The idea 

of ' potentiality ' throws no light on the process .... 105 — 108 

In the practical world this synthesis yields new values that are not only 

conserved but increased ........ 109 

Interdependence of higher and lower : mechanization and direction .- 109 — 112 

Tendency to progression. Final Harmony ..... 112 — 116 

Lecture VI. The Pluralistic Goal. 

In what sense is Society a unity? Two contrasted answers considered 117 — 120 
The transition from Man as animal to Man as social. ' Objective 

Mind' and Rational Persons. Meaning of 'Objectivity' . . 120 — 124 
Mutual implication of Objectivity and Self-consciousness. Kant's 

Subjective and Objective, Deductions of the Categories criticized 124 — 129 

Society a living reality, though a complex and 'over-individual' one . 129 — 130 
The advance towards a higher unity. No • law of diminishing return ' 

here. No ' solidarity ' of Evil 130 — 134 

The Humanitarian Ideal and the Lord's Prayer 134 — 137 



Contents xi 



Lecture VII. The Pluralism of Hegel. 

PAGES 

Hegel at the historical standpoint : here he recognises both the con- 
tingency and the routine in Nature ...... 138 — 145 

But Nature to become Spirit : the Higher the key to the Lower . 145 — 147 

World-history, as Mind working out the knowledge of itself, begins 
with ' the unconscious.' Heterogony of Ends. The World-Spirit 
and its instruments compared to an architect using natural forces. 

But where is this World- Architect to be found ? .... 147 — 152 

It turns out that the completed plan is the architect .... 152 — 156 

Individuals not means but ends. The World-Spirit the living organiza- 
tion which they gradually evolve . . . . . . 156 — 158 



Lecture VIII. The Hegelian Unity. 

Is it a unity differentiated into a plurality or a plurality organized into 

a unity? Hegel's doctrine of the Trinity appealed to in answer . 159 — 160 

The Kingdom of the Father is pure thought : the differences here are 

posited only as ideal : ' the Notion has yet to objectify itself ' . 160 — 164 

In the Kingdom of the Son we come upon difference, the Objective as 
fact. But how are the two Others, the Son and the World, related, 
and how is the transition effected? Der Abf all der Idee ! The 
first in thought the later in existence 164 — 170 

Hegel's doctrine of development. The potential and the actual differ 
only in form. But what is first, it seems, is "the impulse that 
puts forth into existence " ........ 170 — 174 

So, in the Kingdom of the Spirit we find unity to be the result of de- 
velopment. When, however, Hegel tells us that this result is 
the beginning, he does not say what he means . . . 174 — 180 



Lecture IX. The Limits of Pluralism. 

The Plurality of Worlds a problem both for pluralists and theologians. 

To deny it seems futile ........ 181 — 184 

Need for a Supreme Unity as Upper Limit. Appeal to the principle 

of Continuity : A. R. Wallace's arguments 184 — 189 

Is the Unity a Society or a Person? Either way it cannot be absolute; 

but for the theist it transcends the series within which pluralism 

remains. But even so, if immanent it cannot be absolute . . 189 — 195 
The Lower Limit of Pluralism also unattainable from within. The 

demands for a Primum movens connecting both limits . . 195 — 197 

Voluntarism denies the necessity of this. But difficulties for pluralism 

still remain .......... 197 — 201 



Xll 



Contents 



Lecture X. The Difficulties of Pluralism. 

PAGES 

Physical Catastrophes and the Dissipation of Energy .... 202 — 204 

Psychophysical Difficulties. Birth, and death cannot be what they seem 
to be. Pluralism committed to some form of Pre-existence. The 

problem of Heredity ......... 204 — 212 

The problem of Death : here, for pluralism, metempsychosis in some 
form unavoidable. A higher Spiritual Order and the Conservation 

of Values now seem essential ....... 212 — 215 

Metaphysical Difficulties. The Problem of Interaction propounded by 

Lotze met by his own doctrine of ' Sympathetic Rapport ' . .21 5 — 2 1 9 

Teleological and cosmological arguments against pluralism : how far 

valid 219 — 224 



PART II. : THEISM. 
Lecture XL The Idea of Creation. 

Metaphysics without assumptions criticized ..... 225 — 228 

Practical and theoretical value of the Theistic Ideal, even though strict 

proofs of its reality are wanting ....... 228 — 231 

Mistaken views of Creation ........ 231 — 234 

God at once transcendent and immanent : creation then implies more 

than absolute thought or absolute self-consciousness . • . . 234 — 238 

Analogy between Creative Intuition and the Originality of Genius . 238 — 240 
But any adequate idea of God-and-the-World is beyond us ; yet this 
idea meets the defects of pluralism, and is the only idea of the 

Absolute we can admit . . . . . . . . 240 — 242 

Tendency of Theism towards Singularism. But if the world is real, it 
stands over against the reality of God. In making it, God limits 

himself : apart from it we have no basis for our ideal of God at all 242 — 246 



Lecture XII. The Cosmology of Theism. 



Theism usually occasionalistic. Earlier and later forms of the doctrine. 

Leibniz's objections not decisive ....... 

Anyhow the Realm of Ends does not imply a prior system of means. 

On the pamphysical view such a system not necessary at all 
Monads as 'the real atoms of Nature.' Interaction as 'sympathetic 

rapport.' Organism and Environment as implying a twofold 

relation of monads 25 

Comparative merits of Pampsychism and Occasionalism 



247—25 



251—254 



4—2 59 

259 — 262 



X 



V 



\ 



Contents xiii 



Nature as ' the preparation for Mind ' means only that self-conscious 
existence is attained to gradually from earlier stages of merely 
sentient life 262 — 265 

Tracing this process backwards, we approach that lower limit which 
pluralism cannot explain. How does theism interpret it ? Theism 
is ready nowadays to accept evolution in the literal sense. But 
evolution as epigenesis raises formidable problems . . . 265 — 269 

Lecture XIII. Freedom. 

To combine Pluralism with Theism we must reconcile finite freedom 

and divine foreknowledge. What do we mean by freedom ? . 270 — 273 
Meanings of Cause. Law of Causality as a postulate . . . 273 — 277 
Hence two senses of determination — the one including, the other 
excluding, the ideas of efficiency and guidance ; yet the thorough- 
going ' determinist ' identifies them 277 — 283 

Analysis of Voluntary Action : Motives and Forces contrasted . . 283 — 286 
A Man's volitions and his Nature. Determinism and Sensationalism. 

Flux and conflict of motives without a Self, absurd . . . 286 — 291 

Lecture XIV. Freedom and Foreknowledge. 

The doctrine of Kant and Schopenhauer — noumenal liberty and 
empirical necessity. Operari sequitur esse applied to men and 

things alike .......... 292 — 295 

But are human characters and chemical qualities thus on a par? 
Schopenhauer's 'noumenal freedom' a dogmatic blunder, and 

Kant's 'nature-necessity' an inconsistency .... 295 — 300 

Yet Kant's distinction of homo phenomenon and homo noumenon is 
important, the one an observed object, the other a subject per se. 
The phenonema of filled time produced by such subjects, which 

are thus not a part of the time-order that they make . . 300 — 304 

Relation of abstract time to experience. Necessitarianism fails through 
assuming that there is nothing but filled time ; how time is filled 

it does not inquire ......... 304 — 307 

But if the filling of time is eternally decreed, Necessitarianism is in- 
evitable 308 — 312 

Attempts to reconcile freedom and ' foreknowledge.' The Pluralistic 

via media ........... 312 — 316 

Lecture XV. The Problem of Evil and Pessimism. 

This problem simple for those who first assume God's existence as 
certain. But we have to dispose of the problem first ; and so 
must take the defensive 317 — 319 



xiv Contents 

PAGES 
Pessimism as excessive reaction against exuberant optimism . . 320 — 322 
Schopenhauer and Hartmann's faulty psychology .... 322 — 330 
Hartmann's Romantic Metaphysic includes a Theogony and a Cosmo- 
gony 330—333 

His answer to the questions he set to Schopenhauer : his ' Evolutionary 

Optimism ' and his Scheme of Redemption .... 333 — 338 

Lecture XVI. The Problem of Evil and Optimism. 

The doctrine that happiness is the end, common to optimists and 
pessimists alike, implicitly denied by 'the Hedonistic Paradox.' 

The doctrine shown * to entangle itself in a vicious circle ' . . 339 — 349 

Evolution and the Relativity of Evil . . . . . . . 349 — 351 

But is the evolution we find in this world ideally the best? . . . 351 — 353 

Omnipotence and so-called ' Metaphysical Evil ' .... 353 — 355 

Alleged ' Superfluous Evil.' Is Experience in general worth what it 

costs? . . • 355—357 

And what of evils not obviously due to imperfect experience? The 

World's Conservative Factors ....... 357 — 360 

Will Progress be followed by Decline ? ...... 360 — 361 

Lecture XVII. Moral Evil and Moral Order. 

Theological doctrines and philosophical theories that ignore evolution 

leave Moral Evil an ' insoluble mystery ' 362 — 364 

Innocence and Wrong-doing. The rise of Conscience . . . 364 — 368 
This not a fall but an advance, and rids us of the doctrines of a Fall 

and of Original Sin ......... 368 — 371 

Without the possibility of Moral Evil an evolving world could not be- 
come moral at all ........ . 371 — 374 

The Moral Evil in the world not such as to justify atheism . . . 374 — 377 
But this evil, it is said, is not confined to human misdeeds : the so- 
called Divine Government is either immoral or it does not exist at 

all. The objection discussed ....... 377 — 380 

Evidence to replace the old belief in 'special interventions' . . 380 — 382 

The tragedy of the world as a divine comedy ..... 382 — 384 

Lecture XVIII. Theories of a Future Life. 

For Man the present life inadequate, but the difficulty of conceiving 

any other has grown with the advance of knowledge . . . 385 — 388 

Metaphysical arguments do not meet it, for personal continuity is what 

we require ........... 388 — 393 

The ' question of Immortality ' depends on the 'meaning of the world' : 
apart from this we cannot decide it one way or other. Anyhow 

some Continuity of Memory and of Environment is essential to it . 393 — 395 



Contents 



xv 



Memory implies both a subjective function and objective 'records': 
the organism not the sole repository of the latter. Analogy be- 
tween germinal soul and disembodied spirit. Organism the result 
of subjective interaction, not vice versa ..... 395 — 401 

Continuity of Environment secured in Transmigration, but to secure 
personal continuity it has to be assumed that latent memories are 
eventually revived, and that in 'the nascent state' the soul can 
select 401 — 405 

Personal continuity secured by the Christian ' Transfiguration ' but 
without continuity of environment. Possible combination of the 
two views. Purgatory as an intermediate state. Conclusion . 405 — 408 



Lecture XIX. Faith and Knowledge. 

The moral argument, and the main one, for a future life is a matter of 
faith not of knowledge and is further dealt with only in this con- 
nexion here. A quotation from Kant introducing the whole topic. 

Agnostic objections 409 — 413 

' Primitive credulity ' as the source of knowledge .... 413 — 416 

Faith and Logic : Faith and Reason 416—419 

The Meaning of the World and what it implies 419 — 421 

Necessity for Belief in God ........ 421 — 425 

Belief in a Future Life. Counter-arguments ..... 425 — 428 

The Moral Ideal and Faith 428 — 429 



Lecture XX. The Realm of Ends. 

The Course of our inquiry : — The Natural and the Ethical ; The Start 
from the Pluralistic Standpoint; The advance to the Theistic; 
The Problem of Evil; The two voices — Faith and Knowledge 

The positive results seemingly attained : — I. As to Method 

II. As to God . 

III. As to the World 

IV. As to Faith in the Unseen 

Practical arguments : Nietzsche's natural ' Over-man ' and the Christian 

'Spiritual man '.......... 

The Absolute End 

Supplementary Notes. 



The Meaning of Contingency . 
Dr Howison on Creation . 
The Relation of Body and Mind 
The Temporal and the Eternal 
The Divine Experience . 



I. 
II. 

III. 

IV. 

V. 

Index 481 — 490 



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-453 




454 




455 




461 




468 




477 



ERRATA 

p. 6 1 as legend — Stationary States and Persistent Types. 
p. 98, line 2 from bottom — 'integration' for 'differentiation.' 
p. 279, note 2 — p. 8 for p. 9. 



PART I. 
PLURALISM, 



LECTURE I. 

INTRODUCTORY. 

Mr Bradley concludes his metaphysical essay en- 
titled Appearance and Reality with the admission that 
science is a poor thing if measured by the wealth of 
the real universe: he finds that "in the end Reality 
is inscrutable," and is confirmed in " the irresistible 
impression that all is beyond us." Everyone must 
acknowledge this to be a more honest conclusion than 
the pretended demonstrations of many philosophers. 
Nobody now-a-days — save here and there a man of 
science off his beat, like Haeckel for example — has the 
hardihood to rush into print with a final explanation 
of the Universe. Still without perpetrating this folly 
can we not attempt to advance, to get more insight 
than at present we have ? Surely this is possible, for 
though ignorance be inevitable, no specific errors are 
necessary. 

But we must have some method : in particular we 
must be clear where we start from. It is a favourite 
phrase now widely current that the universe has many 
aspects, and such a conception has the merit of making 



2 Introductory 

us vividly realise a source of error too often overlooked 
in the past — I mean confusion of standpoints. Precise 
orientation of these various aspects of the world is 
one of the first duties of philosophy, and the ascer- 
tainment of the supreme and ultimate standpoint is 
perhaps its chief concern. Now of these various 
aspects the two most sharply contrasted are those 
which lead us to speak of the world of mechanism and 
the world of morals, the subject-matter of the natural 
sciences on the one hand, and that of the moral sciences 
including history on the other. The one Kant was 
wont to call the Realm of Nature, the other the Realm 
of Ends ; assigning to the former as its characteristic 
mark the notion of ' empirical necessity,' to the latter 
that of ' practical freedom.' 

It would be superfluous to spend time in picturing 
out this contrast in detail 1 : we have only to think of 
comparing some classical work of science — say Newton's 
Principia — with one of history — as, for example, his 
contemporary Clarendon's Great Rebellion — to realise 
impressively the complete diversity of the two realms. 
Regarding the scientific ideal of Nature as a rounded 
whole, we may safely say that the world of science and 
the world of history have little or nothing in common : 
their terminology, their categories, their problems are 
wholly different ; and so too are the philosophical 
questions to which they severally and immediately give 
rise. The one never reaches the individual and con- 
crete, the other never leaves them; for the one spon- 
taneity and initiative are impossible, for the other 

1 Cf. my article : ' Mechanism and Morals,' Hibbert Jl, Vol. iv. 
!9°5, PP- 79 ff - 



Science and History 3 

inertia and rigorous concatenation ; to the one the 
notions of end and value are fruitless, nay meaningless, 
for the other they are of paramount importance. And 
yet the two cannot be separated, for Nature not only 
provides the scenery and properties of history but the 
actors themselves seem to have sprung from its soil, to 
owe their position largely to its cooperation, and to 
come into touch with each other solely through its 
means. After all, these so-called realms are but 
' aspects ' of one w r orld ; and it is precisely this fact 
that makes their seeming contrariety and incompati- 
bility a problem for philosophy : where and how are 
we to find the final unification or mediation of the two? 
It will be one step towards a solution if we can deter- 
mine which aspect is the more fundamental. It hardly 
needs to be said that since the dawn of speculation the 
claims of both aspects have had, as indeed they still 
have, their advocates. Those who assign the priority 
to Nature we call Naturalists : those who contend for 
the priority of free agents we may call Spiritualists. 
In a previous course of Gifford Lectures 1 , which I had 
the honour to deliver in Aberdeen ten years ago, I en- 
deavoured to show the superiority of the spiritualistic 
position. The main lines of the argument can be very 
briefly indicated and I trust it will seem to you fitting 
that I should recapitulate them by way of introduction 
to the further inquiry into the nature of the spiritualistic 
realm and to the discussion of some of its problems, 
which I propose in the present course to attempt. 

Reviewing the progress of the natural sciences 
since the times of Galileo and Descartes we may note 

1 Naturalism and Ag?wsticism, 3rd ed., 1906. 



4 Introductory 

two characteristics. First, in so far as the qualitative 
variety and the complexity of concrete things are con- 
sidered, we find several distinct sciences each with its 
own special concepts and methods, though all are more 
or less inductive and experimental. But all qualities 
and complexities whatever that natural objects present, 
and all the changes that they undergo, appear to 
involve quantitative constants and configurations ad- 
mitting of more or less precise determination and 
measurement. As soon indeed as the movements of 
sensible bodies were found to admit of exact description 
by the science of mechanics the hypothesis at once pre- 
sented itself that, as Newton expressed it, " the other 
phenomena of nature might be deduced from mechani- 
cal principles." And, as we all know, the hypothesis 
has been amply justified, though not indeed absolutely 
verified in every detail ; mechanical explanation has 
therefore long been accepted as the ne plus ultra of 
what a scientific explanation can be. So much is this 
the case indeed that even the intractable problem of 
life is still generally regarded as only an outstanding 
difficulty and not as a veritable exception to the 
universality of mechanical laws. 

We come now to the second characteristic. For 
long this mechanical theory was held to furnish us 
with the knowledge of the empirical reality which our 
sensible experience was supposed only obscurely to 
symbolise : it bore, in fact, the name of Natural 
Philosophy. But as its purely formal character became 
more apparent, and mathematical equations enabled it 
to dispense with the real categories of substance and 
cause, physicists themselves were the first to perceive 



The Concrete and its Symbols 5 

and to proclaim that this mechanical theory was after 
all but an abstract and ideal scheme — a pure science, 
which can only be actually 'applied,' as we say, with 
the help of the calculus of probabilities. And what 
diversity and irregularity the seeming simplicity and 
uniformity of large numbers may cover human statistics 
sufficiently show. In place then of the concrete world 
of sense symbolising this abstract scheme, it has now 
become clear that it is the abstract scheme itself which 
symbolises the concrete world from which it set out. 
It also indeed reveals the law and order that there 
prevail ; but what the concrete world really is and what 
is the source of the law and order that it manifests are 
questions still wholly on our hands. But to call such 
descriptive scheme pure or rational science is to em- 
phasize its source in mind ; and when this intelligible 
scheme of our devising, with which the scientific 
inquirer greets Nature, is confirmed by Nature's 
response, are we not justified in concluding that 
Nature is intelligent or that there is intelligence 
behind it ? 

When however the physical realists — those I mean 
who regard the mechanical theory not as an abstract 
summary of Nature's routine but as presenting fully- 
orbed reality — when these realists are called upon to 
explain the relation of this mechanism to mind they 
become involved in hopeless inconsistencies. The 
mechanism is by definition an absolutely closed system, 
determinate in all its movements down to the minutest 
detail. Not merely does it brook no interference, but 
interference is strictly speaking inconceivable : the 
semblance of such could only mean the presence of 



6 Introductory 

further mechanism hitherto concealed. Mind then is 
to be interpreted as an impotent and shadowy con- 
comitant of brain, which is itself but a part of this 
mechanism inextricably linked in with the rest: we are 
conscious to be sure, but only conscious automata. 
This would seem to be the one possible conclusion from 
the naturalistic premises, if any conclusion were possible 
at all. But it also becomes a complete refutation of 
them the moment we raise an obvious question which 
Naturalism, owing to its absorption in the material 
aspect, -has entirely overlooked : the question, I mean, 
How from the standpoint of consciousness is any 
knowledge of this independent mechanical system to 
be accounted for ? Or, what comes to the same thing, 
how from the naturalistic standpoint can it be known 
that consciousness is concomitant with certain mechani- 
cal motions ? Agreeably to its contention for the priority 
of its own standpoint, Naturalism terms the contents 
of its world phenomenal, and those of consciousness 
merely epiphenomenal. But now the tangible, visible, 
sonorous world, the world of external perception — from 
which the naturalist starts and to which in all his 
observations and experiments he appeals to verify the 
applicability of his theory — this world belongs entirely 
to the epiphenomenal series. So too does every con- 
cept in his theory as such ; so that his appeal to ex- 
perience to validate it is but an admission of its con- 
nexion with the perceptual, the so-called epiphenomenal. 
In short, awaken the naturalist from his mathematical 
ecstasy and the ' epi ' at once drops away from our phe- 
nomena, while his phenomena — since he regards them 
as independent existences — turn out not to be pheno- 



Phenomena and Epiphenomena 7 

mena at all. On the other hand, if we leave him where 
we found him, oblivious of the essential implications of 
experience, and contemplating per impossibile a closed 
system of mass-points in motion, then assuredly the 
notion that these have dependent, epiphenomenal, con- 
comitants or 'collateral products' will never dawn upon 
him, or even admit of statement without contradiction. 
But a workable interpretation of experience compels 
us not only to reject this distinction of material 
phenomena and mental epiphenomena, but to reject 
also the tacit assumption that our percepts are merely 
subjective modifications. This whole distinction of 
phenomenon and epiphenomenon is but the old story 
of the Cartesian dualism over again. But after puzzling 
the world for nearly three centuries, it seems — at least 
as a philosophical tenet — in a fair way to disappear. 
Make two mutually exclusive halves out of the one 
concrete world : in the one you will find only your 
own so-called subjective states and have to become a 
solipsist ; in the other the organisms you would find 
there you could call only automata at the best. 

This brings us to another inconsistency in which 
Naturalism is involved ; for, even if conscious, the 
automata as part of the continuous mechanism are, as 
already said, powerless to withstand or to control it : 
consciousness is only comparable to a shadow that 
incidentally in some mysterious way accompanies their 
working. To be sure we seem active, ever striving for 
ends, and the historical world would become meaning- 
less if we were not. We do not infer this activity : it 
is prima facie an ultimate and cons'itutive fact of our 
daily experience and of its historical development. 



8 Introductory 

None the less we are asked to believe that it is false, 
because otherwise the mechanical theory cannot be 
upheld. Granting then for the moment that our sense 
of activity is illusory, we have at least in turn the right 
to ask how the illusion can have arisen. Pure mecha- 
nical science recognises neither activity nor passivity, 
but only mass that is inert and motions that are re- 
versible. But inertia is a negative term and becomes 
meaningless if we have no experience of activity. 
Such activity, however, as the historical world implies 
could not be found in the physical world unless that 
showed signs of being intelligently directed : but then 
such evidence could only be appreciated by beings 
who were themselves active. Moreover that evidence 
would be fatal to the mechanical theory itself — for a 
mechanism admitting of direction could not be a closed 
system — and so with the fall of the theory would fall 
also the objections to our common-sense conviction 
that were based upon it. 

) All this however is negative argument; but positive 
arguments are not wanting. For instance, we say that 
1 knowledge is power,' and so ' to be forewarned is to 
be forearmed.' In proof we can point to instances 
innumerable in which the very knowledge of what in 
' the natural course of things ' will inevitably happen 
is the sure means of falsifying such a forecast. To 
take the very simplest illustration : lifeless masses do 
not get out of one another's way as masses under living 
guidance almost invariably do. Were it otherwise, the 
actual course of things would be vastly more calculable 
but would cease altogether to be intelligible. Solely 
because, though inviolable, what we significantly call the 



Inert Mass and Living Guidance 9 

'laws' of Nature can yet be turned to account, do 
they deserve the name of laws ; and what limits our 
power is not their inflexibility but our own ignorance. 
Or again, compare living organisms and their pro- 
cesses, on the one hand, with inanimate objects and 
the changes that they undergo, on the other. We 
note at once an ever-increasing complexity as we rise 
in the scale of life, from the amoeba say to ourselves ; 
and also in our artificial products as we rise in the scale of 
civilisation, say from the African kraal to the European 
city. The steady downward trend, the katabolic, 
levelling tendencies attributed to unchecked mechanism 
we find not merely suspended but reversed wherever 
there is life and mind. The notions of form, adaptation 
and control here force themselves upon our notice in 
contrast to matter and its blind, purposeless collisions. 
Undeterred by this amazing contrast, however, those 
who uphold the theory that Nature is really a closed 
mechanism must, and do, refuse to draw any line : 
living and lifeless, artificial and natural, are distinctions 
of no account from the point of view of the mechanical 
whole : life and mind are the concomitants of certain 
of its workings but the determinants of none. Still 
the prevision just now referred to and this sharp con- 
trast are there, and have to be accounted for somehow : 
to allow that they exactly tally with the presence 
of life and mind and advance continuously as these 
advance is but to state the problem, not to solve it. 
To be content with this is as veritable a specimen of 
what Germans call ' beer philosophy ' as the profound 
remark that great rivers run through populous towns. 
In the first place a series of coincidences so vast 



V 



io Introductory 

cannot be casual and disconnected ; and yet if the 
mechanism on the one side is a closed system, the 
living experience on the other cannot be even its 
' collateral product,' as we have already seen. The 
hopeless impasse of dualism again confronts our 
naturalist, and he is fain to appeal to metaphysics ; 
but the appeal he trusts is harmless, since he only asks 
for an Unknowable Reality to unite his mechanical 
phenomena with the psychical epiphenomena that run 
parallel with them. It is needless to enlarge on the 
absurdity of such metaphysics: that has been effectively 
exposed more than once already 1 . It is enough to note 
that all this agnostic monism comes to is the admission 
that there is a connexion and the confession — perhaps 
I should rather say, the contention — that this connexion 
is inexplicable. But what precisely is this connexion 
as a fact, and why is it inexplicable ? We must turn 
to experience for an answer. There we find not indeed 
a dualism of material phenomena and mental phe- 
nomena, but a duality of object presented and subject 
affected, of subject striving and object attained : an 
interaction that is only inexplicable because for every 
finite experience it is ultimate — is its basal fact. 

With this fact of the duality in unity of experience 
before us we are at the historical standpoint, the stand- 
point of the concrete and individual. Tracing the 
gradual development of experience we can see how the 
distinction between the real and the phenomenal arose, 
how with the advance of intersubjective intercourse and 
the growth of language the so-called trans-subjective 
objects, objects that, so to say, were common property, 

1 Cf. Bradley, Appearance and Reality \ pp. 1 2 7 ff. 



Experience a duality in ^Lnity 1 1 

ceased to be regarded as property — or relative to 
experiencing subjects — at all, while the objects of 
immediate experience were regarded as the peculium 
of the individual and so as not objects at all : in other 
words, we can see how the psychology of dualism came 
to shut itself in and the physics of dualism to shut 
itself out, by sundering the one world of experience 
into two halves, an internal and an external, both ab- 
stractions and so both devoid of reality. In particular 
such epistemological reflexion at once discloses the 
abstract character of the entire mechanical scheme, to 
which I have already referred. 

Again, the light which experience on its practical 
side throws on the whole process and progress of 
knowledge is of fundamental importance. We are not 
simply cognitive beings : moreover, knowledge does 
not evolve itself, as it were by some purely immanent 
process, while we merely look on. Even if it may be 
so unfolded when acquired, its acquisition is only 
secured piecemeal, by arduous effort, and many mis- 
adventures. All this implies motives, implies ends to 
be attained : we seek knowledge primarily because it 
proves an aid to more and fuller life. Apart from this 
its quest' would be unintelligible : this brings it within 
the scope of the realm of ends. Finally, if we consider 
the main structure of knowledge, we find that its funda- 
mental principles of unity, causality and regularity are 
derived from this standpoint: in other words, the main 
structure of our concept of Nature is entirely anthro- 
pomorphic. The unity of Nature is the ideal counter- 
part of the actual unity of each individual experience, 
where synthesis ever precedes analysis, and things are 



1 2 Introductory 

only distinguished relatively to each other so long as 
they are apperceived together by the one subject. The 
category of causality we owe to the interaction of 
active subjects with their environment and especially 
with one other, and we attribute it analogically to 
what we then call the interaction of natural agents. 
Then as to the regularity of Nature or the universal 
reign of law, this never has been, and never can be, 
empirically established, nor does its denial involve any 
contradiction : that is to say, it is neither demonstrable 
nor axiomatic. It is a postulate that has its root in our 
primitive credulity : were this anticipatio mentis never 
confirmed, knowledge would be impossible ; but con- 
firmed as it is continually in our earliest experience we 
thus advance to an interpretatio naturae as an orderly 
and intelligible system, a cosmos that evinces directly 
or indirectly the all-pervading presence of mind. 

To sum up in words that I have lately used else- 
where : — "We are active beings and somehow control 
the movements of the bodies we are said to animate. 
No facts are more immediately certain than these, and 
there is nothing in our actual experience that conflicts 
with them. From these facts we advance to the 
abstract concepts on the strength of which Naturalism, 
by a grievous misapprehension of its own standpoint, 
attempts to question them. Stationed at the very 
outskirts of the knowable and intent only on the 
quantitative aspects of things — like those fabulous 
beings of geometrical romance, the inhabitants of 
Flatland — it finds impassable barriers which have no 
existence in the fuller dimensions of concrete ex- 
perience. But we, orientating from this more central 



Spiritualistic Monism 13 

position, may retort upon Naturalism with the words 

of Goethe, 

Das Unzulangliche 
Hier wird's Ereigniss : 
Das Unbeschreibliche 
Hier wird's gethan. 

Having satisfied ourselves, then, that mechanism is 
not the secret of the universe ; that, if it is to have 
any meaning, it must subserve some end ; and finding 
generally that increased knowledge of Nature's laws 
means increased control of Nature's processes, we 
accept the facts of experience in which subject and 
object interact, rather than the conclusions of dualism, 
that mind and matter are for us two alien worlds and 
all knowledge of Nature an inexplicable mystery 1 " — 
we accept the spiritualistic standpoint and its Realm 
of Ends as the more fundamental. 

I have called this position spiritualistic monism to 
distinguish it from materialistic monism, which we may 
disregard as obsolete, and from neutral or agnostic 
monism, which we may fairly treat as an inept and 
ineffectual attempt to get round the deadlock of dualism. 
But if this position be indeed the more fundamental, it 
ought to be possible, it may be urged, to see directly 
from this standpoint how the appearance of mechanism 
arises, or at least to make some progress towards 
accounting for it in terms of life and mind. Un- 
questionably it ought : and in fact, as we shall 
presently see, attempts have been specially numerous 
of late to meet this demand in a more or less scientific 

1 Philosophical Orientation and Scientific Standpoints, Berkeley, 
California, 1904. 



1 4 Introductory 

fashion. Meanwhile we may remind those who demand 
of us an explanation of the appearance of mechanism, 
that, if the term be strictly taken, there need for 
spiritualism be no such appearance at all. The more 
completely we can interpret the world as a realm of 
ends the more completely the tables are turned upon 
naturalism. As this contends, in the words of Huxley, 
" for the gradual banishment from all regions of human 
thought of what we call spirit and spontaneity 1 ,'' so 
that, for the gradual banishment of what we call inert 
stuff and directionless energy. 

To see how the case stands let us recall the contrast 
between science and history just now referred to. The 
first effect of this contrast was the extravagant common- 
place that history as unscientific had no interest for the 
philosopher. The final result may be the other extreme, 
that science as general and abstract has no interest 
for the philosopher ; since he is concerned only with 
reality, and that is concrete and individual out and out. 
4-t any rate the thought of the last century made a 
very decided advance in this direction : in the course 
of it what were formerly called the descriptive or 
natural history sciences culminated in the philosophy 
of evolution, while abstract physics is lapsing, as we 
have seen, from its old supremacy as the mechanical 
philosophy to the rank of a merely descriptive 
scheme 2 . As compared with the nineteenth century 
the eighteenth — though it produced great historians — 
was a century devoid of historic sense. Its specula- 

1 Collected Essays, Eversley edn, Vol. I. p. 154. 

2 Cf. Boltzmann, quoted in Naturalism and Agnosticism, Vol. 1. 
p. 166. 



The Historical Method 15 

tions concerning the origin of society, of language, 
of religion, show this. And, as the most recent 
historian of scientific thought has pointed out, the 
work of Laplace shows this too. Both his Mdcanique 
celeste, " dealing with the general laws of motion and 
of lifeless masses," and his Thdorie de la Probability 
" dealing with the arithmetical properties of large 
numbers of units, leave out of consideration that 
hidden and mysterious phenomenon [fact] to which 
alone is attached... all that commands interest in the 
created world — the existence of individuality 1 ." And 
yet it was in the latter of these works that Laplace, 
brushing aside freewill as a palpable illusion, pro- 
claimed the implicit omniscience of the mechanical 
theory in a passage that I took for the text of my 
former lectures 2 . In like manner the belief in fixed 
and immutable species prevented Laplace's great con- 
temporary, Cuvier, from appreciating the genetic 
view of nature, where the supreme importance of 
the individual first appears as — to quote an expression 
of Hegel's — 'involving the species and genus in 
itself,' where variation and heredity become the central 
problems of biology and where the classifications of 
system-makers cease to be of value save as a pre- 
liminary clue. I have mentioned Hegel, and — what- 
ever may be thought of other sides of his philosophy 
— its value in this connexion can hardly be over- 

1 J. T. Merz, A History of Europea?i Thought i7i the Nineteenth 
Century, Vol. i. 1896, p. 124. 

2 It was reserved for Clerk Maxwell to point out clearly the 
inevitable limitation of the Laplacean data. Cf. his Life by Campbell 
and Garnett as quoted by Merz, op. at. Vol. 11. 1902, p. 559. 



1 6 Introductory 

estimated. " If the historical literature of our time," 
said Zeller, "no longer contents itself with eruditely 
unravelling or critically sifting traditions, piecing to- 
gether and pragmatically elucidating particular facts, 
but seeks first and foremost to understand the funda- 
mental continuity of events, to comprehend broadly 
the development of history and the spiritual principles 
that control it, this advance is due not least to the 
influences that Hegel's Philosophy of History has 
exercised 1 ." Now for Hegel human history meant 
struggle for rational freedom, as for Darwin natural 
history meant struggle for existence : both are teleo- 
logical concepts, both imply individual agents and 
unique, events, for both the physical world is pro- 
visionally a means to ends. The historical method, 
then, we may say, is altogether the product of the 
nineteenth century and there we find it claiming " to 
have invaded and transformed all departments of 
thought." "A belief in this method," said Sidgwick 
in the course of a polemic against it, " is the most 
widely and strongly entertained philosophical conviction 
at the present day 2 ." 

Even the negative side of this transformation, the 
waning of scientific realism, is largely due to the 
growing conviction of the central importance of the 
concrete and historical. It is not merely the truth 
that laws imply agents, nor again the truth that 
scientific laws are only abstract formulae — what here 
becomes apparent is that scientific generalisations are 
an economic device necessitated by our limitations. 

1 Geschichte der deutschen Philosophic, p. 824. 

2 'The Historical Method,' Mind, 1886, p. 203. 



The Passing of Physical Realism 1 7 

But it is to Ernest Mach, a physicist who has turned 
philosopher, that we owe the most impressive presen- 
tation of this truth. " In reality," he says, "the law 
always contains less than the fact itself, because it 
does not reproduce the fact as a whole, but only that 
aspect of it which is important to us, the rest being 
either intentionally or from necessity omitted 1 ." If 
we were capable of that intellectual intuition of which 
some philosophers have dreamt, there would be no 
enforced omissions, no intractable residuum, no 
sundering of ' that ' and ' what ' in our knowledge ; 
history would not be left outside science, but rather 
science be taken up into history. We should not start 
with the abstract and general, unable to reach the 
concrete and individual, but being fully acquainted 
with every individual we should be relieved of the 
incommensurability of fact and law. Omniscience of 
this sort would surely bring us nearer to reality than 
the omniscience of Laplace's imaginary spirit with its 
completed world-formula. Order there would needs 
be in such a world, if it is to be a world at all. But 

1 Mach, ' The Economical Nature of Physics,' Popular Scientific 
Lectures, p. 193. This necessary limitation of discursive thought has 
led to two distinct but more or less complementary attitudes towards 
concrete reality. Elated by the power and precision that generalisa- 
tion secures, science was encouraged on the one hand to hope that 
by extending its network of general relations it would at length 
completely encompass the individual, on the other to despise the 
particular as mere 'stuff' of no account save as it was formed by 
participation in general ideas. It was mainly the former tendency 
that led to the philosophic indifference to mere history and experience 
as unscientific that characterizes Descartes, Bacon and Hobbes for 
example. The latter tendency shows itself in Schopenhauer's 
singularly inconsistent contention that history is a mere hurly-burly 
( Wirrwarr), only the accidental form of the appearance of the idea. 



1 8 Introductory 

in a realm of ends the order and meaning would be 
primarily the outcome of the purposes of the active 
beings composing it : only to discursive intellects such 
as ours could this order emanating from individual 
agents appear as a warp and woof of external law 
shaping some primordial stuff. As naturalism claims 
to approximate to a complete formulation of this 
phenomenal order, so spiritualism may claim to ap- 
proximate to an interpretation of the underlying 
reality ; but it will have this advantage, that while it 
may be possible, setting out from mind, to account for 
mechanism it is impossible, setting out from mechanism, 
to account for mind. 

Such an approximation to a spiritualistic inter- 
pretation we actually have in the history of the living 
world. Here we are ever in the presence of individual 
things, from which science indeed sets out, but to 
which it can never return, individuals marked down 
by dates and places and actually designated or ad- 
mitting of designation by proper names 1 , individuals 
who have no ' doubles,' whose like all in all we never 
shall meet again. The events with which we have 
here to deal are the unique acts and deeds that have 
their origin in individual centres of experience, not 
events that seem to occur uniformly as resultants of 
universal and unvarying law. Further, it is not the 
intrinsic nature of objects but their value for the par- 
ticular individual that immediately determines each 
one's attitude towards them ; and as the individuals 
vary so do their interests and pursuits. But quidquid 
petitur petitur sub specie boni : the idea of the good, 

1 To which therefore no concept is adequate. 



The Idea of the Good 19 

as Plato long ago taught, is here the supreme category 1 . 
If however there were as many goods as there are 
individuals and all were disparate and independent, 
this would not help us much. But the individuals of 
history are none of them isolated, for though no two 
be altogether alike no two are altogether different. 
So community and co-operation become actual goods, 
struggle a possible evil calling for readjustment, and 
the harmonious realisation of individual ends the ideal 
consummation, the "one far off divine event to which 
the whole creation moves." * 

Meanwhile the course of history shows us the 
gradual building-up of society and civilisation and 
therewith the attainment at each advance of ends that 
were inconceivable at an earlier stage. But these ever- 
widening social groups and ends of ever-increasing 
scope are still in every case individual and concrete. 
The subordinate individuals or the particular aims 
which the wider embrace are still to be regarded as 
members or constituents of an articulate whole and 
not as instances of a general class, in which the 
content diminishes as the extent increases 2 ; for in 
these historical wholes, we must again insist, there 
is never complete homogeneity of parts. On the 
contrary, the higher, over-individual ends, as they 
are sometimes called, — politics, industry, science, 
literature, art — imply a differentiation among men that 
in spite of its significance would defy classification. 
The more organized the community the more diverse 
the individuals it includes, and the more man appears 

1 Rep, vi. 505 a. 

2 Cf. Rickert, Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffs- 
bildung, 1902, p. 394. 

2 — 2 



20 Introductory 

as the historical animal. At the same time the reali- 
sation of these ends invests him, so to say, with a new 
environment, a metamorphosis of nature, an artificial, 
humanly created, medium, which throws the immediate 
environment of the naked and resourceless troglodyte 
more and more into the background. Entre Vhomme 
et la Nature, said Comte, il faut Phumanite'. 

Still, it will be objected, beyond humanity and 
history, beyond, if you will, the whole realm of sentient 
life, Nature is there all the while, and there as no 
mere background but as the basis of the whole, the 
fundamental plasma which can only be shaped because 
it is itself determinate and orderly. Granting this we 
may yet urge that there is nothing in Nature, when 
we try to envisage it as a whole, that is incompatible 
with a spiritualistic interpretation. In the historical 
world we place determinate agents first, and the order 
and development which we observe we trace to their 
action and interaction. It has never been shown that 
^ve need, nor made clear that we can, interpret Nature 
otherwise. 

One problem of supreme importance to such an 
interpretation does however arise, and this problem 
the objection we are considering directly suggests. 
We have only to an insignificant extent shaped 
Nature, we have not made it ; we are not even 
settlers from a foreign clime but aborigines seemingly 
sprung from the soil. But the principle of con- 
tinuity is supposed to turn the edge of this ob- 
jection, and to this principle pampsychism appeals, 
though it does not rest on that alone. " Nature never 
makes leaps," said Leibniz. Every organism has its 
peculiar environment, the simpler the one is the simpler 



Pampsychism 2 1 

the other will be. Recent knowledge has shown the 
range of life to extend far into the region of what was 
once regarded as the inanimate, purely physical world, 
and it has further shown the lowest known organisms 
to be highly complex and extremely varied. But there 
is nothing to suggest that we have reached the limits 
of life : all we can say is that our senses and the 
artificial aids and methods of research at present 
available do not enable us to discriminate between 
yet simpler forms of life and their environment ; not 
that these do not exist. There is then, it is contended, 
no warrant for the assumption of a completely inanimate 
environment at all : we ought rather with Spinoza to 
conclude that " all individual things are animated, albeit 
in diverse degrees 1 ." We ought so to conclude too, 
because — continuity apart — what can neither do nor 
suffer, what is nothing for itself, is truly nothing at 
all ; for — again as Spinoza maintained — every indi- 
vidual thing, so far as in it lies, endeavours to 
persist in its own being 2 . On this, the pampsychist 
view, Nature thus resolves into a plurality of conative 
individuals ; and the range and complexity of the 
correspondence between a given individual and its 
environment marks the stage to which it has advanced 
in its interaction with the rest. But to cite Spinoza is 
to give point to the difficulty that has still to be met. 

Will a plurality of interacting subjects account for 
itself and for the unity which interaction implies ? 
This is the question which in the following lectures 
we shall have carefully to discuss. Suppose we decide 
this question in the negative, that will not affect the 

1 Ethics, 11. 13, Schol. 

2 Ethics, in. 6. 



22 Introductory 

main issue as between spiritualism and naturalism : for 
such ground of the world of living and acting things 
would — if we should be led to assume it — surely be 
itself living and acting. In any case then we have a 
realm of ends, the only question is : — what is its con- 
stitution, how is its harmony secured ; is it, so to say, 
a more or less orderly democracy, is it a limited 
monarchy, or is it possibly an absolute one ? 

This is none other than the old and formidable 
problem of the One and the Many ; and this, it has 
been said, will be the philosophical problem of the 
twentieth century. Certainly there are few questions 
more to the fore at the present time. It is fitting 
then that with this we should begin. But with such a 
problem much depends on the side from which we begin 
and the method that we adopt. The great idealistic 
systems of the nineteenth century began with the 
One as absolute and adopted what may be generally 
described as a speculative or a priori method. Of the 
greatest of these systems, that of Hegel, even its most 
sympathetic critics have allowed that, however perfect 
its ideal may be in itself, its attainment is, and must 
ever remain, humanly impossible. And this verdict, 
I do not think it audacious to say, is easy to justify : 
it simply amounts to protesting that we can never 
transcend ourselves. The first requisite of philosophy 
is organic coherence : it cannot, so to say, have two 
independent growing points, and so long as experience 
is the one there can be no finality about philosophy. As 
experience advances its meaning will unfold itself to 
reflexion more and more : so further progress makes 
further regress possible and what is last in the order 
of experience brings us nearer to what is first in the 



The question of Method 23 

order of knowledge. On experience as it develops 
the ideal of the pure reason may rise to perish never, 
but it was certainly not discernible at first ; and if 
present now, its full meaning is ineffable still. The 
superlative, the absolute, the infinite are limiting 
notions, and for aught we know are notions only : 
ideals of the reason they may be, but then reason 
itself is an ideal. There seems no end to the process of 
rationalising experience, but — as I said at the outset — 
at least there may be progress, and our confidence, 
that, as Hegel maintained, the real is rational and the 
rational real may deepen as we proceed. But we must 
start where we are and continue as we have begun, 
letting knowledge grow from more to more. To say 
this is to imply that those idealists who have attempted 
to begin with the Absolute have not really done so. 
That they have not has been amply proved by their 
critics and admitted by their apologists. But at any 
rate in the flights of pure thought up to the Absolute 
the atmosphere of empirical fact by which it is sustained 
is too diffused to be detected, and when that summit is 
reached the particular, the many, of actual experience 
tend to disappear or to be explained away. Thus 
their " alleged independence " — in which we empiri- 
cally believe — Mr Bradley declares "is no fact, but a 
theoretical construction ; and so far as it has a meaning, 
that meaning contradicts itself, and issues in chaos.... 
The plurality then sinks to become merely an integral 
aspect in a single substantial unity, and the reals [the 
many] have vanished 1 ." Nevertheless the inevitable 
reaction, which the impossibility of philosophical 
finality involves, has already set in : indeed Mr Bradley 
1 Appearance and Reality, 2nd edn, p. 143. 



24 Introductory 

prophesied as much: " Monadism," he says, "on the 
whole will increase and will add to the difficulties 
which already exist 1 ." Whether the second half of his 
forecast will turn out to be as true as the first remains 
to be seen. At any rate the plurality of the realm of 
ends is what is most patent to us at the outset : if the 
difficulties of Pluralism point the way to Singularism 2 
they will at least serve to make the character of the 
One clearer than any ' cheap and easy monism ' 
evolved at a dialectical show — such as Mr Bradley 
in a famous passage has himself described 3 — can ever 
do. It will be well too as regards method to let the 
spirit of the time lead us ; turning aside from what has 
been described as " Naturalism's desert on the one 
hand and the barren summit of the Absolute on the 
other," to follow the historical method as far as possible 
in tracing the gradual evolution of ideas, but trusting 
to speculative methods only in the endeavour to divine 
the most satisfactory solution of the problems to which 
they gave rise. 

In the next lecture then we must try to ascertain 
the genesis of the ideas which lead to the problem of 
the One and the Many, and then we may proceed to 
examine the solution which those who are called 
Pluralists or Personal Idealists uphold. 

1 Op. cit. p. 118, Jin. 

2 This term, first used by Kiilpe as the correlative of Pluralism 
{Einleitung in die Philosophies § 14), may not be happy; but it is 
after all better than Henism ; and it is not misleading as Monism 
according to present usage, i.e. with a qualitative as well as a quanti- 
tative sense, certainly is. Wolf, who invented the term, used it, as 
I have done, only in the qualitative sense as applicable either to 
materialism or to spiritualism. 

3 Principles of Logic, p. 533. 



LECTURE II. 



THE ONE AND THE MANY. 



It is very commonly assumed that idealism or 
spiritualism is synonymous with theism, or at least 
inseparable from it. It is true that idealists are rarely 
atheists, but it would be dogmatism to assert offhand 
that they cannot be. Still less can we say that if not 
monotheists, they must be pantheists, in the sense 
of denying the reality of the world altogether as 
Spinoza is commonly credited with doing, and so was 
called by Hegel not atheist but acosmist. Pantheism 
in the sense of identifying the world with God is but 
'a polite atheism,' as Schopenhauer has said, but such 
a pantheism is not compatible with idealism. So " from 
a world of spirits to a Supreme Spirit is apossible step," 
is all I ventured to say in my former lectures at Aber- 
deen 1 ; for it is not straightway evident that it is a 
necessary one. Many of those called pluralists or 
personal idealists deny the necessity, and some even 
question the possibility of any such step. — We cannot, 
of course, admit a multiplicity without any unity. A 
One of some sort is obviously implied in talking of a 
world at all ; but may not the Many account for their 
own unity instead of requiring a One, an individual of 

1 Naturalism and Agnosticism, Vol. n. p. 202. 



26 The One and the Many 

another order, to account for them ? May not the 
unity of the world be analogous to that of a society, so 
presupposing the individuals associated ? Or must we 
assume beyond and above the Many and their unity an 
Absolute One, of which they are somehow the appear- 
ance ? This is the problem of the One and the Many 
to which we have now to turn. As an essential pre- 
liminary to any attempt to deal with it we have agreed 
first of all to ascertain, if we can, how the ideas of the 
One and the Many arise in the course of advancing 
experience and thought. 

The correlation or duality involved in all experience, 
that namely of an individual subject and its objective 
environment, is often described as a duality of Ego and 
Non-Ego, of Self and Not-Self. But it is important 
to note, on the one hand, that this objective Not-Self 
is not presented as another self, but simply as an 
'Other.' Also it is equally important to note, on the 
other hand, that this objective 'Other' has always for ex- 
perience a certain continuity or unity, which — though it 
differentiates more and more as experience develops — 
never completely disintegrates into a discrete manifold 
or mere plurality. Again the relation of the subject to 
this objective continuum is always one of more or less 
dependence. But the subject, as we have already seen, 
is not wholly inert : it is always active and selective 
to some extent ; otherwise, indeed, it could never be 
aware of its dependence. As experience extends and 
the objective differentiates, the subject too advances in 
initiative and acquires new powers ; but never, so to 
say, overtops and outstrips the Non-Ego. On the 
contrary, increasing knowledge though it secures in- 



Nature as the One 27 

creasing power also deepens this sense of dependence. 
Primitive man attempts to subjugate or circumvent 
Nature by magic, but science has long since taught us 
that our ends of self-preservation and physical better- 
ment are only to be attained by such adaptation and 
adjustment as Nature allows. 

But the advance of Science, it is said, does not 
merely deepen this sense of our ultimate dependence 
on Nature, it also tends increasingly to emphasize 
Nature's complete independence of us. We talk of 
our life as a struggle, but at least Nature does not 
deign to struggle with us. We talk of shaping and 
selecting ; but the further our knowledge of this in- 
terminable Other confronting us extends, the more 
inevitable to many seems the conclusion that in truth 
it is we who are shaped and selected by Nature. 
Such in brief is die gelduterte Naturbetrachtung des 
denkenden Naturmenschen, as Haeckel calls it ; and 
the only Absolute One, in which Naturalism believes, 
is the result. And what ultimately is this Absolute 
which Haeckel's clarified vision discerns ? It is per- 
manent substance ; more definitely, it is the kinetic 
world-ether, whose mass and energy are eternally con- 
served, and whence the Many result as atomic souls by 
an inexplicable condensation or concentration. This 
world-ether is the only 'creative divinity' that Haeckel 
allows. And Herbert Spencer comes very near to this 
when, in the recent revision of his First Principles, he 
suggests that "the only supposition having consistency 
is that that in which consciousness inheres is the all- 
pervading ether 1 ." We have then here that form of 
so-called pantheism — in which all the stress is on the 
1 First Principles, 1900, p. 201. 



28 



The One and the Many 



'pan' — the pantheism that maintains — as Schopen- 
hauer put it — " that the world is there in virtue of its 
own internal energy and through itself" — a world in 
which consciousness, according to him, is a secondary 
and unfortunate episode. 

But this polite atheism, as I have already said, we 
cannot accept. Though but a reed, to use Pascal's 
words, man is a thinking reed, and cannot be merged 
in or emerge from such a world, however vast it be. 
Man only knows the world as it faces him and he inter- 
acts with it, and he knows it only so far as he finds it 
intelligible. And finding it intelligible he can only con- 
clude that it is not after all an alien Other but has its 
ground and meaning either in another self or in a com- 
munity of selves. This much we are taking as already 
clear. Let us turn then to consider the idea of the 
Many, which in fact we reach first and which leads to a 
concept of the Absolute still older than that of objective 
substance. 

The individual subject soon learns to distinguish 
certain objective differentiations or bodies, in form and 
behaviour resembling that particular differentiation 
which is present in all its own experience as the 
body or organism that it is said to animate. These 
other bodies it regards as each one animated by a self, 
and it often finds that it is itself so regarded by them. 
But such other selves only tell on the individual's 
experience, because their bodies form parts of the one 
objective whole that is so far common to them all, and 
through which all their intercourse and interaction are 
mediated. That is to say, only the bodies and their 
movements are presented as objects, the indwelling 
selves (or souls) and their experiences are not thus 



The Many as Ejects 29 

presented. To mark this difference we may adopt 
Clifford's term and call these other selves and their 
experience 'ejects.' In the infancy of the human race 
this ejective analogy ran riot : primitive philosophy, if 
we may credit the untutored savage with such a luxury, 
found life and mind everywhere. But it was still life or 
mind set in the matrix of a common environment, pos- 
sessing always a definite embodiment and location there- 
in and manifesting itself solely by this means. We can 
imagine other selves transcending ourselves indefinitely, 
as we can imagine them indefinitely lower than our- 
selves, in what we call the scale of being. But if we 
hold to the continuity which a scale of being implies, 
we must imagine them all — higher and lower alike — as 
subjects in correlation with objects and not as in them- 
selves absolute or complete. As Hegel's unfortunate 
colleague, Beneke, was fond of maintaining in opposition 
to him : — " The human mind is incapable of devising 
or excogitating anything absolutely ; on the contrary 
it must derive either from external or from internal 
experience the essential elements of all that it imagines 
or thinks 1 ." 

On the lines then of that experience which brings 
us into communication with our fellow-creatures, the 
experience that underlies the animism, mythology, 
and polytheism of primitive culture, we can at best 
only imagine an experient who is primus inter pares, 
at any rate so far as the duality of subject and object is 
concerned : we cannot reach on these lines the thought 
of an Absolute One. Even the living and true God, 
who is the object of worship in monotheistic religions, 
cannot be identified with the Absolute, for worship im- 
1 System der Metaphysik, 1840, p. 496. 



30 The One and the Many 

plies mutual distinction and mutual interest. Moreover 
the history of religion shows clearly that the idea of a 
supreme and only God has been developed through 
polytheism, and has so far an anthropomorphic basis. 
For "pure monotheism," as Dr Caird has said, "God 
was merely one subject among other subjects ; and 
though lifted high above them, the source of all their 
life, was yet related to them as an external and inde- 
pendent will 1 ." But the point on which we have to 
insist is rather that to be a subject at all, in any sense 
that we can understand — so long that is as the term 
subject carries any meaning for us — is to be confronted 
by an Other as object. A supreme subject then taken 
alone, no less than the objective World so taken, is 
but a one-sided abstraction and cannot be veritably an 
absolute reality. 

Certainly, it will be said, the true, the absolute 
Absolute is not exclusively subjective, still less ex- 
clusively objective : it is the unity of both. — Mythology 
had its cosmogony and even its theogony, but in rising 
towards the idea of a Supreme Spirit, speculative 
monotheism, at all events, has tended to conceive both 
God and the World sub specie aeternitatis. The entire 
objective world and the many finite subjects which 
interact with it or within it, in all their totality and in 
all their distinctness, are, it is said, to be conceived as 
eternally present to God as His own creative intuition 
and self-manifestation. The world is for God too, but 
not as for us, merely as given fact, but entirely as 
thought or deed. This sublime ideal is again a limit 
towards which our thought can only approximate ; and 
the history of thought shows not only how gradually 
1 The Evolution of Religion, 1893, Vol. 11. p. 72. 



Ancient Ideas of Creation 31 

the advance towards it has been made : it shows also 
that difficulties emerge as this ideal is more distinctly 
conceived. 

But let us note the steps. All finite beings, we 
have found, are in part passive and only in part 
active ; but they appear as increasingly active the 
higher in the scale of being they stand : God as the 
Supreme is then to be regarded as purely active and 
wholly free from external constraint. Whereas we 
can only shape and arrange so far as the elements 
and forces of nature permit, for God there is no 
nature ; no need for mechanism to transform ' chaos 
without form and void ' into a cosmos teeming with 
purpose and life : for him there is only his own 
creation. But this idea of creation, creation ' out of 
nothing,' is hard to seize. Not only does the Mosaic 
account — with its void and formless earth, its primeval 
darkness and the spirit of Elohim brooding over the 
waters — fail to reach it ; but the philosophic specu- 
lations of Plato and Aristotle failed to reach it too. 
Both recognise a materia prima as a sort of half-real, 
indeterminate, potential stuff — wholly receptive and yet 
more or less recalcitrant — to which form and life are 
imparted, but which itself was never made. All this 
suggests a generative process, nature but not creation ; 
indeed Plato, in the Timaeus at all events, compares 
this primary matter, as Aristotle called it, to a nurse 
or receptacle of all generation 1 . Such ideas point to 
a dualism not to an Absolute unity : God and Nature 
are distinct. And, in fact, both Plato and Aristotle in 
different ways explicitly separate Nature as the sensible 

1 Cf. Twiaeus, 49 ff. 



32 The One and the Many 

world from an intelligible world which is the direct 
object of the divine thought and contemplation. 
Between the two worlds they fail to establish any 
satisfactory connexion 1 ; but if we leave the sensible 
world out of account, we have in the Platonic world of 
ideas and in the divine vorjoris vorjcreojs of Aristotle 
a unity of subjective and objective which we may fairly 
call the Absolute, since it is perfect and complete in 
itself. Of this the sensible world is a superfluous and 
imperfect — nay an impossible — replica, that can neither 
really be nor be really known. 

And if we are *to be in earnest with the notion of 
creation out of nothing does it not equally eliminate 
any idea of generation or of reproduction, does it not 
suggest that sort of eternal ' static perfection ' which 
such processes as producing, impressing, or in-forming, 
exclude ? A subject who is actus purus, clear there- 
fore of all the limitations pertaining to space and time, 
who apprehends not by sense and comprehends not 
by discursive thinking, what object can he have which 
is not himself? Must we not say then that he does 
not make even out of nothing, for what is made cannot 
be its Maker ? and yet if the Maker is absolute, what 
else can it be ? He acts, but his acts are immanent 
not transeunt : he becomes his own Other only that 
he may be conscious of himself, and so we call him 
causa suz, and interpret this as meaning an absolute 
self-consciousness. Such at any rate has been the 
usual outcome of philosophic monotheism : it tends to 
end in acosmism. Aristotle's position, for example, is 
summed up by Dr Caird as " the pure self-conscious- 

1 Cf. Caird, The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, 
1904, Vol. 11. pp. 238 ff. 



The One and Acosmism 33 

ness of God, in which subject and object and the 
activity that relates them to each other — vovs, voi^tov 
and v6t)o-ls — are perfectly unified and which, therefore, 
is complete in itself without reference to any other 
object," — but such absolute self-consciousness " cannot 
logically be conceived as going beyond itself to create 
the finite world of movement and change 1 ." The 
same dualism between God and the world reappears 
in the philosophy of Plotinus — a philosophy in some 
respects an amalgam of the Platonic and the Aristo- 
telian — the same inability, that is to say, to show, as 
Dr Caird puts it, "how God, who is absolutely 
complete in himself, can yet be the source of existences 
which are external to him and not included in the 
process of his own life 2 ." In the philosophy of 
Spinoza, to which, as already said, the name acosmism 
was first applied, this difficulty is specially apparent. 
His many expositors have failed to show any con- 
ceivable connexion between what he called natura 
naturata and God, in whom all the modes and dis- 
tinctions of the former disappear, and whose existence, 
as Spinoza himself has said, is " toto genere different 
from theirs." 

In fact, observing that 'creation out of nothing' 
has another side — ex nihilo nihil fit — we might not 
unfairly say that this is the side which the acosmic 
tendency of Absolutism inevitably emphasizes. The 
world of finite existences created out of nothing is 
nothing ; that is to say, it is Schein not Sein, ap- 
pearance not reality, as the Eleatics first proclaimed : 

1 Op. cit. 11. p. 241, 

2 Op. cit. 11. p. 257. 

w. % 



34 The One and the Many 

it is the Maya of Brahmanism, the inexplicable illusion 
enveloping the One, that 

...like a dome of many-coloured glass 
Stains the white radiance of eternity. 

But the conclusion that reality cannot be Many led 
naturally to a yet further development of the idea of 
the Absolute. The Absolute in the end was conceived 
not so much as the unity 4/* subject and object but 
' rather as a unity that transcends both. Such an 
Absolutism we find, for example, in the One of 
Plotinus, the Substance of Spinoza and the Neutrum 
of Schelling. And I fear we must allow that those 
who would add Hegel's Absolute Idea to the list are 
probably right, unless indeed we are willing to admit 
that it is — as he himself as good as says — not the 
Absolute but only its shadow. But there is still a 
step. After all, we and all our speculation belong to 
the world of so-called ' spurious existence ' ; and as to 
the One, so transcendently different from all that we 
know — none of our concepts are applicable to it. It is 
Nicht in contrast to Icht, as Eckhart quaintly says. 
We ascend to it, as the ' negative theology ' of the 
Scholastic mysticism taught, by dropping one after 
another every determinate predicate, so that we end 
by saying with Proclus that the One or God is above 
substance and life and intelligence, and cannot even 
be called One except figuratively ; or with Basilides 
that it is rather to be called absolute non-existence, or 
again with the author of the Theologia gewnanica that 
it must be called Nothing, by which is meant that it is 
nothing of all that created things can conceive, know, 



The One of Mysticism 35 

think or name 1 . No doubt the mystics did not intend 
by this rejection of all positive determinations to imply 
that there was no God or that God was nothing : 
rather, as Hoffding puts it : — " In the mystical concept 
of God, as well as in the Buddhist concept of Nirvana, 
it is precisely the inexhaustible positivity which bursts 
through every conceptual form and turns every deter- 
mination into an impossibility." It was in this sense 
that Fichte said that " every so-called concept of God 
is necessarily that of an idol 2 ." Thus not merely 
graven images are disallowed, but in the end all 
determinate thoughts, of this super-essential, super- 
rational, super-personal, nay, super-absolute unity 3 that 
is neither subject nor object and in which all difference 
begins and ends. 

But there is yet a possible concept of the One to 
be noticed which experience directly suggests — that of 
the world-soul, the eject to which the world belongs 
as its organism. But for the present this notion only 
interests us in that it formed a sort of tertium quid 
or mediating principle by which Plato and his Neo- 
platonic followers attempted to connect the permanent 
and intelligible world with the sensible world of the 
finite many that ever change and pass. And the 
attempt is obviously futile, for from the point of view 
of the Absolute there is no sensible world with which 
to connect itself — were such connexion in itself possible. 

1 Cf. art. ' Mysticism ' by Prof. Pringle-Pattison in Ency, Brit. ; 
Mansel, The Gnostic Heresies, 1874, p. 146; Hoffding, Philosophy of 
Religion, 19 10, § 21, and note 37. 

2 Werke, v. p. 267. 

3 So Nicholas of Cusa. Cf. Caird, Evolution of Religion, 11. pp. 73 f. 

3—2 



36 The One and the Many 

The world-soul is really one term in an emanation to 
which the very fulness of the Absolute somehow gives 
rise, but which as little concerns it, as the chance 
reflexion of its beams affects the effulgence of the sun 
itself. This ingenious analogy of emanation suggested 
by the solar radiation, though common in ancient 
thought, is most fully elaborated by Plotinus. As it 
is the precise converse of the modern doctrine of 
evolution, this process might be conveniently called 
devolution ; for as that is a progress from the lower 
to the higher this is a decline from the higher to the 
lower. With every remove there is not only less 
perfection but seemingly also more plurality, more 
diffusion. The vovs, which proceeds immediately from 
the One, is already beset with the duality that even 
intuition implies ; the world-soul, which follows next, 
is necessarily pluralised into particular souls ; each of 
these in turn is resolved into higher and lower faculties 
by its relation to the body which it shapes and informs, 
while this body again is infinitely divisible. Beyond 
all is matter as mere indeterminate emptiness, dark- 
ness and evil, the utter contrary in all respects of the 
absolute fulness, light and perfection of the One. In 
a word plurality and separation with their broken lights 
are the marks of imperfection and unreality : our very 
birth, i.e. the assumption of a body, is in part a sin, in 
part a punishment ; and the only remedy for this evil 
lies in a mystic reunion with, and absorption in, the One. 
We have thus passed in review several ideals of a 
supreme Unity which speculation, regardless of expe- 
rience, has elaborated — an Absolute Object, an Absolute 
Subject, an Absolute Self-consciousness, and various 



The Absolute as Object or Subject 37 

attempts to transcend such duality as consciousness 
implies. The first two we reject not as being one 
but as being one-sided : since subject and object are 
essentially correlative, neither alone can be absolute. 
Still even these ideals point the moral that our 
whole review suggests — Nulla vestigia retrorsum. 
An absolute reached by way of abstraction is the 
lion's den, where all plurality disappears. In what- 
ever sense you say absolute in that sense you cannot 
say many. If there were an absolute substance or an 
absolute subject there could not be many substances 
or subjects, unless these terms were equivocally used ; 
as substance for example was by Descartes, and subject 
by Fichte. And if absolute means perfect and com- 
plete, why should — nay, how can — what is in itself 
absolute become splintered up into infinite modes that 
are neither perfect nor complete ? We can imagine 
them as mutually determining each other, but for it 
they are but ' invulnerable nothings ' with which it 
has no concern. This is the difficulty that has been 
specially emphasized by critics of Spinoza. It recurs 
in a more concrete form, but then as illustrating the 
one-sidedness of an absolute object, in the naive pro- 
cedure of such thinkers as Spencer or Haeckel when 
they jump from a homogeneous plenum or uniform 
all-pervading ether to the discrete atoms into which it 
somehow has to be, and yet nohow can be, resolved — 
unless some directing agency or prime mover be forth- 
coming from without. Similarly the Absolute Ego of 
Fichte can only be got under way with the help of an 
unintelligible Anstoss (or impact) determining it to 
posit its non-Ego. 



38 The One and the Many 

We come then to the ideal of an absolute ex- 
perience as the unity, it might seem, of Absolute 
Subject and Absolute Object, an Absolute that is no 
longer one-sided and without distinctions. But again 
there can be only one such consciousness, and it must 
be transparently clear, a light, so to say, in which is no 
darkness at all. In our experience the contemplation 
of what we sometimes call the eternal truths of reason 
and again the intuitive certainty of our consciousness 
of self come nearest to this ideal. We find accordingly 
that ancient speculation laid more stress on the former, 
as in Aristotle's ^0770-19 voyjo-ecus ; and modern on the 
latter, as in Hegel's sick selbst denkende Idee : though 
both aspects are always present. Outside such an 
Absolute there can be nothing at all, and within it 
nothing that is imperfect, mutable or obscure. The 
more clearly we realise this ideal the more inevitably 
three conclusions force themselves upon us: (1) Here 
there is nothing wanting : this intelligible world is 
perfect and complete in itself, (2) from this tran- 
scendent standpoint the existence of the finite Many — 
the sensible world — seems impossible, and (3), granting 
its existence, the connexion between the two worlds is 
inexplicable — inexplicable at least apart from assump- 
tions incompatible with the character of such an ideal. 
The way upward to this by abstraction and idealisation 
is comparatively easy — though such methods cannot 
pretend to yield knowledge ; but the way back has 
in fact only been possible by means of myths and 
metaphors, which are not even logically consistent. 
Not-being or the non-existent is always endowed with 
some sort of potentiality or receptivity,- which 



Absolute Self-Consciousness 39 

...the One Spirit's plastic stress 

Sweeps through 

Torturing the unwilling dross, that checks its flight, 
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear. 

We talk of creation out of nothing. But if the 
qualification ' out of nothing ' has any meaning at 
all it implies a transeunt activity on the part of the 
Creator and a certain lack of reality on the part of 
the creature — a lack of reality which sinks back to 
complete unreality when the creature is compared 
with the Creator, as Meister Eckhart, for example, 
maintained. But on the other hand what possible 
meaning can we assign to transeunt activity on the 
part of the Absolute ? If then we emphasize the 
notion of creation simply and regard the creative 
activity as purely immanent, then as with Spinoza 
causa is the same as ratio ; what is said to be created 
is the intelligible world, where, sub specie aeternitatis, 
all things follow from the ' nature ' of God " in the 
same way as from the nature of the triangle it follows 
from eternity and for eternity that its three interior 
angles are equal to two right angles 1 ." 

I have referred to the method by which such ideals 
of the Absolute are reached as a method of abstraction 
and as, therefore, necessarily defective. It will be 
well, if possible, to make this clearer. What we may 
call the three unities of experience, the unity of the 
subject, the unity of the object, and the unity of both 
in self-consciousness, are hardly to be questioned. Now 
the objective side of experience, to begin with that, is 
always a complex or differentiated whole : the more 

1 Ethics, 1. xvii. note. 



40 The One and the Many 

primitive the experience the fewer, the simpler, and 
the vaguer the differentiations ; but an objective 
continuum wholly devoid of diversity would yield no 
experience. Yet such a homogeneous whole is just 
what we reach by abstracting first from all the quali- 
tative differences of particular bodies, and then from 
their particularity or discreteness : in place of an 
ordered cosmos there then remains only a continuous 
plenum, as in the Cartesian concept of matter or the 
modern concept of a primordial ether. Mistaking 
abstraction for simplification, we call that absolute 
which is really only above all relations because it is 
completely indeterminate. As we have already seen, 
the cosmos or concrete whole cannot be called absolute, 
if we regard it as what is experienced, that is as ob- 
jective; but this abstract resolution of it into an aireipov 
escapes such one-sidedness, only because this cannot be 
objective. Turning to the ideal of an Absolute Subject, 
we find that this again is reached by an abstract pro- 
cedure, though a different one. Generalisation up to 
an ideal limit is out of the question here ; instead of 
that we have one phase of the empirical subject 
selected and made absolute. Ignoring the receptive 
side of experience altogether we try to conceive a 
pure activity. In Fichte's phraseology, Gegenstand 
implies Widerstand, object implies opposite : a subject 
then for whom there can be no opposition is one for 
whom there can be no object, no other. It again 
escapes the charge of one-sidedness only because such 
an Absolute, though called by Fichte an Ego, is no 
subject in any sense that we can understand, as Fichte 
was careful to maintain. Finally, the ideal of an 



The Absolute reached by Abstraction 41 

Absolute experience is reached by abstraction, whether 
we regard its contents as the intelligible world of 
eternal ideas or as the identity of subject and object in 
self-consciousness. The Platonic system of archetypal 
ideas or eternal patterns is after all for our experience 
not independent of the many nor prior to them, but is 
simply a system of abstractions resulting from such 
comparisons, generalisations, and analogies, as the 
sensible world itself suggests to us. A consciousness 
again which is self-consciousness and nothing more, 
which is solely and completely a ' self-revelation/ 
whose whole content is self — self explicated in self and 
through self and for self, such a consciousness is from 
the point of view of experience an abstraction. A 
part of such experience as we can understand is taken 
for the w T hole ; for we are never conscious of self save 
as we are conscious of not-self. The two factors are 
analytically distinct but not actually separable : so far 
then self-consciousness alone seems to be an abstraction. 
If we nevertheless elect to regard this ideal as the sole 
and ultimate reality there seems no place left for finite 
experients and the sensible world, as I have already 
urged. And not merely so, but the impulse to pass 
beyond multiplicity to unity, to which we have so far 
yielded, carries us on to a final simplicity beyond all 
explication, where mysticism hails ' Naught as every- 
thing and everything as Naught.' If on the other 
hand, keeping to experience, we admit the abstract 
character of this ideal, then we have the problem of 
the unity of the many still on our hands. 

But what sort of unity can we reach if we refrain 
from all attempts absolutely to transcend the Many ? 



42 The One and the Many 

A mere totality or aggregate is obviously no true unity, 
even though we could know — which is, in fact, im- 
possible — that it was an absolutely totality. Some 
community or reciprocity there must be : the question 
is how little will suffice. It seems clear that either 
each must be connected with all in at least one way or 
that all must be so connected with some one. There 
must be either a universal principle directly relating all 
or a supreme, though not absolute, individual, to whom 
all are related. The latter will imply the former, so far 
as through their common relation to the Supreme One 
all would be related — though it were only indirectly — 
to each other. But the converse will not hold; that is 
to say, the direct relation of all to each other will not 
necessarily imply a Supreme One. Of such a funda- 
mental and universal relation we have an instance 
according to the atomic theory in universal gravitation. 
But of course in a realm of ends the universal relation 
can only be analogous to this in the one aspect of being 
universal : the two cannot be identified — though they 
may be related. Empirical evidence of such a universal 
relation there can hardly be : we are left then to assume 
it and to frame some more or less hazardous hypothesis 
as to its nature. I say nothing for the present of any 
difficulty besetting the idea of an absolute plurality of 
any sort, a plurality of beings only relatively dependent 
and therefore relatively independent — independent, that 
is, so far as their bare existence is concerned. This,, 
on our present supposition, has to be taken as a fact. 
The idea of a Supreme One as primus inter pares again 
can hardly admit of empirical verification : the very 
supposition seems to involve an empirically unattainable 



The vacillation of Theology 43 

limit. If we nevertheless make believe that in ' pure 
thought ' this limit is attained and ask how we are to 
represent the relation of all to this Supreme One, the 
old ideal Absolute again looms upon us and threatens 
to absorb the Many altogether. We may recoil from 
this and say : There might have been an Absolute, 
provided there had been no Many, but holding to the 
reality of these we can regard God as supreme, but not 
as absolute : then we seem to save the Many, but we 
have only a ' finite God,' or rather the idea of one. 

Thus we seem shut up to what looks like a choice 
of evils. Without an Absolute One it seems hopeless 
to attempt to account for, and hazardous to attempt to 
unify, the Many ; and with such an Absolute it seems 
as hopeless to attempt to retain what independence 
and freedom the Many appear prima facie to possess. 
And this seemingly inevitable perplexity shows itself 
throughout the history of religion in a constant alter- 
nation between first claiming and then abdicating a 
distinct position for Man over against God. Think, 
for example, of the counter doctrines of Augustine and 
Pelagius and the controversies to which both in ancient 
and modern times they gave rise. Or again take 
the vast literature of religious mysticism, from which 
one instance may suffice: — Eckhart who said: Couldst 
thou annihilate thyself for a moment thou wouldst 
possess all that God is in himself, also said, " I am as 
necessary to God as God is necessary to me." In this 
connexion I am glad of an opportunity of quoting 
Mr Bradley, from whose main position I am forced to 
dissent. "Religion," he says, "prefers to put forth 
statements which it feels are untenable, and to correct 



44 The One and the Many 

them at once by counter-statements, which it finds are 
no better. It is then driven forwards and back between 
both, like a dog which seeks to follow two masters.... 
We may say that in religion God tends always to pass 
beyond himself. He is necessarily led to end in the 
Absolute, which for religion is not God. God, whether 
a ' person ' or not, is, on the one hand, a finite being 
and an object to man. On the other hand, the con- 
summation, sought by the religious consciousness, is 
the perfect unity of these terms [the Absolute and 
God]. And, if so, nothing would in the end fall 
outside God. But to take God as the ceaseless oscil- 
lation and changing movement of the process, is out of 
the question. On the other side the harmony of all 
these discords demands... the alteration of their finite 
character. The unity implies a complete suppression 
of the relation, as such ; but, with that suppression, 
religion and the good have altogether, as such, dis- 
appeared. If you identify the Absolute with God, that 
is not the God of religion. If again you separate them, 
God becomes a finite factor in the Whole. And the 
effort of religion is to put an end to, and break down, 
this relation — a relation which, none the less, it essen- 
tially presupposes. Hence, short of the Absolute, God 
cannot rest, and, having reached that goal, he is lost 
and religion with him 1 ." 

In the history of philosophy again we find the same 
perplexing alternation between asserting and denying 
a position for the Many incompatible with the absolute- 
ness of the One : we find this not only in the form of 
a reaction from absolutism to pluralism in successive 
1 Appearance and Reality, pp. 446 f. 



Alternations of Speculation 45 

thinkers but what is more remarkable we find it — and 
find it invariably — within systems of philosophy that 
are avowedly philosophies of the Absolute. And yet 
in truth it is not remarkable, for it could not really be 
otherwise. Ex vi termini, there can be no reality 
distinct from the Absolute. But if X, Kand Z assert 
this absolute Reality they must thereby distinguish 
themselves from it, and even distinguish themselves 
the more the more distinctly they seek to realise their 
own inclusion within it. To deny their own individual 
reality at such a time is out of the question further, 
because only through this have they any notion of 
reality at all. But at other times they easily forget it ; 
as the naturalist, for example, forgets the subjective 
implications of experience when engrossed in its objects. 
Nay, they even assume, once the summit of their 
speculation is attained, that their necessary starting- 
point, the distinct reality of the Many, is transcended 
and annulled. But the feat of kicking down the ladder 
by which you have climbed is logically possible only 
when the conclusion reached is at once a necessary 
consequence of the premises and also in itself absurd. 
No doubt there is always the semblance of a purely 
a Priori procedure in most philosophies of the Absolute : 
the entire construction claims to be the work of pure 
thought, true independently of all finite experience. 
But Descartes' Cogito ergo sum, the proposition round 
which, as Hegel said, the whole of modern philosophy 
revolves 1 , is in this connexion past all question. And 
hitherto all attempts, starting from the Absolute to 
respect the Many as this proposition demands, have 
1 Encyclopaedia, § 64. 



46 The One and the Many 

proved unavailing. The reality of the Many is either 
flatly contradicted as by the Eleatics ; or it remains 
inexplicable as with Spinoza or Hegel. Thus Spinoza, 
who begins with an absolutely infinite, that is inde- 
terminate, Substance, ends with a conative Many mu- 
tually determining each other. Again with Hegel, the 
Absolute seems at one time to be a perfect Self with 
no hint of aught beside or beyond its own completed 
self-consciousness, and at another not to be a self at all, 
but only the absolutely spiritual, — art, religion and 
philosophy — the over-individual ends, as they are 
sometimes called, which become realised in subjective 
spirits : not self-conscious Spirit but simply the im- 
personal Spirit in all spirits. 

Thus, as it has been said, "both philosophy and 
religion bear ample testimony to the almost insuperable 
difficulty of finding room in the universe for God and 
man. When speculation busies itself with the relation 
of these two, each in turn tends to swallow up the 
other. The pendulum of human thought swings con- 
tinually between the two extremes of Individualism [or 
Pluralism] leading to Atheism, and Universalism [or 
Absolutism], leading to Pantheism or AcosmismV 

This reaction is most pronounced when, as has 
continually happened, the defects of an absolutist 
philosophy have given rise to an avowed pluralism or 
even naturalism. Such after Hegel's death was conspicu- 
ously the case in the speculation of the Hegelian left, 
as Strauss called it. So Feuerbach describes his seces- 
sion from the Hegelian school by saying "God was my 

1 Pringle-Pattison, Hegelianism and Personality, ist edn, p. 153 
Jin. 



The Start from Phiralism 47 

first thought, reason my second, man my third and last." 
For him afterwards however Man is the beginning, 
the middle and the end of religion : theology is thus 
at bottom anthropology : through social intercourse man 
attains to self-consciousness, to reason and morality, and 
the divine is but the idealisation of the best and highest. 
Hegel's positions then are to be inverted : we must 
say not that the Absolute is self-consciousness, but that 
self-consciousness is the Absolute ; not that God is 
love but that love is God, and so forth. — The rigorous 
pluralism of Herbart again is to be regarded as in 
large measure a rebound from the absolutism of his 
teacher Fichte. Still more markedly was the Monad- 
ology of Herbart's forerunner, Leibniz, a recoil from 
the pantheism or acosmism of Spinoza. Spinoza's one 
substance, essentially indeterminate — every determina- 
tion being for him a negation — is incompatible with 
even the imagination of finite things severally striving 
for self-conservation and mutually determining each 
other ; incompatible with the drama of man's bondage 
and eventual freedom, for example, which is the main 
theme of Spinoza's Ethics. Leibniz then takes his 
notion of conation in thorough earnest and defines 
" substance as an individual agent." "Were it not for 
the monads," he allowed, " Spinoza would be right." 
The mediaeval controversies about universals and the 
principle of individuation are at bottom instances of 
the same reaction, and finally the ancient atomism of 
Leucippus and Democritus was a revolt against the 
Eleatic singularism. 

Obviously the perennial renewal of this conflict is 
a sign that pluralism has equally failed to reach a 






48 The One and the Many 

satisfactory solution of the problem of the One and the 
Many. We must allow, as Adamson has said, that no 
philosophy has ever managed to reconcile these two 
notions of an infinite power and of an infinite variety 
of limited individualised expressions of that power 1 , 
But at all events as regards method the teaching of 
history seems clear : the solution is not to be obtained 
by passing over the Many at the outset trusting to 
deduce them afterwards from an absolute one that is 
reached a priori. This method has proved itself 
illusory : the seeming attainment of the One has 
meant the disappearance of the Many. Against 
pluralism it can only be urged that it fails or has so far 
failed to account for the unity that it in fact involves — 
the unity of individual experience as enlarged by inter- 
subjective intercourse. But at all events it is, I trust, 
clear that we cannot begin by ignoring pluralism 
altogether. 

1 The Development of Modern Philosophy \ 1903, 1. p. 107. 



LECTURE III. 



PLURALISM. 



The most striking characteristic of the nineteenth 
century, so far as philosophical speculation is concerned, 
was, as we have already noted, the predominance of what 
we may call Absolutism or Singularism as presented 
by such different thinkers as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, 
Schopenhauer, and others less distinguished. In the 
lull which followed upon the common collapse of these 
various forms of Absolutism the rapid advance of 
scientific knowledge brought Naturalism or Physical 
Realism for a time to the fore. But the insufficiency of 
this physical realism to bear the strain put upon it is 
at length becoming apparent ; and so the necessity of 
interpreting nature in terms of mind is again widely 
recognised. But the recoil from Absolutism still per- 
sists ; and accordingly the twentieth century opens 
with the attempt to work out the idealistic interpretation 
not in the old way as essentially a devolution of the 
One, but rather — as far as possible — to represent it as 
an evolution of the Many. In England, in America, 
in France, even in Germany — once the stronghold of 
Absolutism — systems of pluralism, more or less pro- 
nounced, are rife. It is hardly practicable and would 
certainly be tedious to examine them separately and in 
detail. We shall get a better insight into the new 
movement if we try to secure distinct ideas of its main 

w. 4 



50 Pluralism 

standpoint and its salient features, even though in so 
doing we have to play the dangerous part of eclectics 
and attempt to frame a composite synopsis of the tout 
ensemble, a sort of Galtonian portrait or generic image 
of the group. 

The pluralistic standpoint in the main is that 
historical standpoint which we have already contrasted 
with the naturalistic. But the ordinary historian is 
content to recognise Nature as indispensable, so far at 
least as it is the scene and provides the properties of 
the drama. But this contrast pluralism claims altogether 
to transcend. To the distinction of person and thing, 
of nature and history, it allows only a relative value. — 
Still we shall best realise the position of pluralism by 
first attending exclusively to the interaction of living 
agents in the world commonly recognised as historical ; 
and then, as far as we can and as well as we can, 
attempting to apply the concepts we derive from this 
to the interpretation of the world commonly regarded 
as physical, the phenomena of which science has 
succeeded in abstractly formulating in terms of matter 
and motion. Of these concepts perhaps the most 
characteristic is that of behaviour or conduct. Be- 
haviour is a term appropriate only to what is individual 
and unique, and is not a mere instance of law and 
uniformity. No one would ordinarily speak of the be- 
haviour of falling bodies ; for, in merely gravitating, 
bodies display no special character. But we might 
speak of a ship or a balloon as behaving well or ill : 
such things have a certain individuality and so receive a 
proper name. Per contra the term individuality always 
implies behaviour. Indeed whenever it is worth while 



Individuality and Behaviour 51 

to give a proper name it is possible also to assign 
a definite character. Thus Goldsmith talks of " the 
lazy Scheldt" and the "wandering Po." Now pluralism 
assumes that the whole world is made up of individuals, 
each distinguished by its characteristic behaviour ; but 
of course it does not find its real individuals in the 
rough and ready way of popular impersonation : it 
would not regard a mountain or a river as a person. 
Conduct or behaviour implies always some objective 
or external situation as the occasion for every mani- 
festation of activity, but never as its sole and complete 
determinant. There is always some subjective spon- 
taneity or initiative, but there is never any absolute or 
unconditional activity. Thus, in spite of the ety- 
mological identity of atom and individual, pluralism 
has nothing in common with atomism beyond the bare 
fact that both recognise a many ; for the atom is 
credited with no spontaneity and is completely deter- 
mined from without. Atom and individual or monad 
are then contraries and cannot be identified or really 
combined. The so-called interaction of atoms will not 
account for the contingency displayed in the world ; 
but what we know as the conduct or behaviour of 
cognitive and conative individuals may, it is contended, 
explain both the contingency and the uniformity that 
we find there. But, before we proceed to consider at 
more length this attempt of pluralistic spiritualism thus 
to interpret the world, it will be well first to inquire 
what we are to understand by an individual or one of 
the many, and what by the unity that even their 
plurality implies. 

Of course we cannot start at the beginning, for that 






52 Pluralism 

is not where we are. How far towards a hypothetical 
beginning the principle of continuity wiJl reasonably 
carry us is just one of the questions we have to decide. 
But we must start, where alone reflexion on experience 
can arise, at the level of self-consciousness. We have 
already seen that singularistic spiritualism or absolutism 
really commenced its speculative flight from this level, 
and pluralism is in no better position. I n self-conscious- 
ness we attain to the explicit knowledge of that duality 
of self and not-self, of subject and object, without which 
experience ceases to have any meaning for us. The 
self of which we are conscious, then, furnishes us with 
our first paradigm of what we are to understand by the 
individuals of our plurality. It is assumed that there 
exists an indefinite variety of selves, some indefinitely 
higher, some indefinitely lower than ourselves. But 
even the highest, if there be a highest, will, it is assumed, 
be only primus inter pares, one among the many, and 
not an Absolute really including them all. Even the 
lowest also will possess whatever be the irreducible 
minimum essential to being in any sense a subject or 
self at all. 

Such minimum implies behaviour directed towards 
self-conservation or self-realisation. An individual no 
doubt is often defined as something that cannot be divided 
without being destroyed, as a clock for instance. But such 
things are not true individuals or selves : a clock has no 
interest in, or impulse towards, its own conservation. — 
Self-conservation alone however, strictly taken and re- 
garded as everywhere realised, would result in nothing- 
better than a static world, in which there would be no 
new events and no history. Such a state as final would 



Self and Self-conservation 53 

correspond to the complete rest and quiescence with 
which, according to Spencer's law of equilibration, the 
drama of evolution must close. As an initial state it 
would correspond to Leibniz's pre-established harmony 
contemplated from without, if that were possible : there 
would be no interaction between individual and in- 
dividual. But the actual world, as our own experience 
teaches us, is full of cross-purposes ; and therefore self- 
conservation in general calls for effort and perseverance. 
— But though self-conservation implies the minimum 
to be striven for, self-development or realisation is still 
the aim of many, and was perhaps at the beginning 
the aim of all. Any advantage gained, though it be 
merely the result of good fortune, will not usually be 
passively surrendered : its loss would be a painful con- 
traction. Thus a new standard, so to say, of the self 
to be conserved would be reached. It is plain then 
that when we talk of self-conservation the main stress 
is not to be laid on the bare conservation of some 
metaphysically simple entity, such as the soul of the old 
rational psychologists. What is meant is rather the 
maintenance of the most advantageous position attained 
by the actual self in relation to the world as a whole. 
This implies that each one is in touch with all the rest 
collectively and with some more specially. As I have 
expressed it elsewhere, there is for every subject one 
totum objectivum, which, save in the limiting case, which 
would answer to an inconceivable beginning of ex- 
perience, will be more or less differentiated. 

By way of summary it may suffice to say that the 
well-known Monadology of Leibniz may be taken as 
the type, to which all modern attempts to construct 



54 Pluralism 

a pluralistic philosophy more or less conform 1 . But the 
theology on which Leibniz from the outset strove to 
found his Monadology, is, in the first instance at all 
events, set aside ; and in particular his famous doctrine 
of pre-established harmony is rejected altogether. The 
positions retained are first, that every monad 'perceives' 2 
every other, secondly, that every monad is appetitive, 
seeking pleasurable situations, or at least shunning 
painful ones. In other words, for every monad the 
totality of the remaining monads constitutes its objective 
world, in which continuously changing situations result 
through the persistent endeavours of each to conserve 
or improve its position. Each, so far as in it lies, is to 
be conceived as 'proving all things and holding fast 
that which is good.' Finally, every system of 
thoroughgoing pluralism accepts the Leibnizian prin- 
ciple of continuity, at least to the extent of maintaining 
that there is no infinite gap, no complete diversity be- 
tween, one monad and another, a principle against 
which the Leibnizian theology itself offends. We may 
now proceed to consider the pluralistic schemes as 
exhibited in the world we ordinarily call 'historical.' 
Let us imagine a great multitude of human beings, 
varying in tastes and endowments as widely as human 
beings are known to do, and let us suppose this 
multitude suddenly to find themselves, as Adam and 
Eve did, in an ample Paradise enriched sufficiently 
with diverse natural resources to make the attainment 
of a high civilisation possible. At the outset each 

1 Cf. his Nouveaux Essais, iv. § 21, and the excellent summary 
in Hoffding's History of Philosophy. 

2 In the Leibnizian sense, that is to say. 



The Historical World 55 

must needs fend for himself, selecting the vocation and 
habitat best adapted to his liking and capacity which 
chance or his superior competitors left open to him ; 
though liable to be afterwards ousted by others less 
favoured in their first lot, but more capable of turning 
their experience to good account. " On all hands 
adventure and misadventure," so at the outset we might 
sum up the whole : the chapter of accidents would 
seem to be the first chapter of this history, and Fortune 
with her rudder or wheel the only power to be clearly 
discerned. In other words, to a reflective spectator at 
this stage nothing would be more impressive than the 
contrast between the stability of their natural sur- 
roundings on the one hand and the instability of this 
striving multitude on the other. But gradually this 
contrast would become less striking. The fittest would 
tend to rise in the struggle and partly to exploit and 
control, partly to educate the rest. Custom and 
imitation would more and more determine the be- 
haviour of the less gifted majority, while the inventions 
and discoveries of the gifted few would tend in the end 
to improve the condition of all. Cooperation and 
division of labour would compass results impossible to 
individual enterprise, and would at the same time entail 
a more intimate dependence of each one on his fellows. 
— The ever accumulating traditions and products of the 
past would afford a steadily progressing vantage ground 
of wisdom and wealth for each succeeding age and a 
corresponding security against the vicissitudes of earlier 
times. In short, in place of an incoherent multitude, 
all seemingly acting at random, we should have a social 
and economic organization, every member of which 



56 Pluralism 

had his appropriate place and function, while the ever 
increasing coincidence of private ends and public ends 
would tend continually to enhance the unity of the whole. 
Turning to the biological world, and regarding the 
several species of living forms as so many plastic 
individuals, we should find at an early stage a similar 
contrast between the continuity and stability of the 
physical environment and the mutual isolation and 
ceaseless variation of an indefinite multitude of more 
or less elementary organisms. And again we should 
find this contrast gradually diminish as, pari passu with 
the advance of certain forms of life to a higher level of 
development, what are known as bionomic adaptations 
came more and more into play. — The primary forms 
of life apparently are the so-called prototrophic bacteria, 
lowly organisms which have the power of working up 
non-living into living materials. But these have no 
such direct relation to, or concern with, other living 
beings as all the higher forms of life have and have to 
an increasing extent the higher in the scale they stand. 
It would be tedious to attempt to describe, for example, 
the wide range of such dependence even in the case of 
zmcivilised man : the bare enumeration of the many 
plants and animals indispensable to man in the present 
state of civilisation would be practically impossible. 
And all these plants and animals, it must be remembered, 
depend in turn and in manifold ways on others. 
Half 'the romance of natural history' lies in such 
bionomic facts. Think of the many curious adjust- 
ments between special plants and special insects on 
which the very existence of both depends, the plant 
preparing food for such insects as are fitted to pollinate 



The Biological World 57 

its flowers. Or again take the wonderful instances of 
mimicry by which animals make shift to evade their 
enemies or delude their prey ; or the complicated 
division of labour prevailing among certain colonies of 
ants and bees ; or, finally, those intimate partnerships 
between distinct species to which the name of symbiosis 
has been given, where in numerous cases the association 
is so intimate that the very life of both participants 
depends upon it. Readers of the Origin of Species 
will recall how Darwin illustrates the wide range of this 
correlation of organisms from the connexion of cats 
and red clover through the intervention first of mice and 
then of bees. The humble-bees fertilise the clover but 
"the number of humble-bees in any district depends in 
great measure on the number of field-mice, which 
destroy their combs and nests," but again ''the number 
of mice is largely dependent, as every one knows, on 
the number of cats": and thus the cats by keeping 
down the mice promote the increase of the clover. 
Similar illustrations might be multiplied indefinitely. 
Perhaps the most impressive of all is the great length 
of what are called ' nutritive chains ' ; under which 
head we may include the reciprocity that is maintained 
between plants and animals. Plants alone are able to 
assimilate inorganic matter : hence in a physiological 
sense it is true that ' all flesh is grass,' for the food of 
all animals either consists of vegetables or is ultimately 
derived from them. On the other hand plants decom- 
pose the carbon dioxide which animals exhale, and thus 
restore to the atmosphere the oxygen w^hich animals 
need to breathe. " Some of the fresh-water fishes in 
a pond," one naturalist points out, " depend upon the 



58 Pluralism 

supply of small crustaceans (copepods, etc.), and these 
again [depend] on much minuter organisms (infusorians, 
diatoms, etc.), and these again, to some extent, on 
the bacteria which cause the putrefaction of the dead 
organic matter." Another "has shown that even on the 
high seas bacteria are present, playing their usual part 
of 'middlemen between death and life' by transforming 
dead organic matter into inorganic substances which 
can be used again by plants 1 ." We may then fairly 
allow that there is a close parallel between the develop- 
ment apparent in the economic aspects of human 
history and that apparent in the bionomic aspects of 
natural history. As in the former so in the latter 
we find a multitude of comparatively isolated and 
independent units gradually advancing, by the survival 
of the fittest among innumerable random variations, 
towards the realisation of ' a vast and complex web 
of life,' whose myriad fibres are all intertwined, though 
every one is unique. 

If now, from the external correlations of organisms 
to each other, we pass to the internal correlations 
within each organism, or from bionomics to what might 
possibly be called physionomics, we note again the 
same progress from relatively independent parts, barely- 
conjoined and hardly differentiated, to highly specialised 
organs intimately associated together in a single living 
whole. ' Loose colonies ' of single-celled organisms 
are supposed to bridge the gulf between separate uni- 
cellular, and individual multi-cellular, organisms ; the 
transition beginning with diminished competition and in- 
creased co-operation among the relatively unspecialised 
1 J. Arthur Thomson, The Science of Life, p. 193. 



Bionomics aiid Physionomics 59 

cells of each colony 1 . But the specialisation of function 
and consequent individuality to be found at first is very 
slight. The common hydra may be halved with im- 
punity so that each segment will restore its missing 
half, but we cannot in this fashion make two bees or 
two frogs out of a single mature one. Or again the 
hydra may be turned inside out and, unless forcibly 
prevented from resuming its natural shape, will even- 
tually right itself and once more become normal. Ob- 
viously no such liberties could be taken with an animal 
in which more definite sense-organs, limbs, and viscera 
had been developed. As in bionomics then so in 
physionomics: every advance entails greater restriction 
and specialisation of function, but also greater perfection 
— a more intimate mutual dependence and a closer 
consensus of members in a more complicated whole. 
Though the facts of bionomics and physionomics 
are most readily described as they are presented, that 
is to say in objective terms, they are, we may hold, only 
to be intelligibly interpreted like the facts of economics 
and social interaction ; as implying, that is to say, 
percipient and conative subjects behaving as severally 
or jointly intent on self-conservation and betterment. 
It is easy throughout to recognise more or less striking 
evidence of experiences discriminated, retained, and 
turned to account. But now the problem has to be 
faced of interpreting the inanimate world in like fashion. 
There we can discern, prima facie at all events, no 
signs of active striving or selective preference or pro- 
gressive organization : there we find no unique indi- 

1 Cf. Geddes and Thomson, The Evolution of Sex, pp. 57, 88 ff.,. 
310 ff. 



60 Pluralism 

viduals, no competing purposes to be adjusted, no 
tentative efforts to be followed at length by success. 
First and last, everywhere and always, there seems to 
be only fixity and uniformity. This is a serious crux 
for the pluralist, let us see how he may deal with it. 

First it is to be noted that in the historical world 
the progress and development of some societies, species 
and individuals halt at a certain point, so that a 
stationary state is reached in which custom, instinct 
and habit are supreme. Among societies we find 
savage peoples still as backward as the primeval men 
of the stone age, and we find others as advanced as 
the Chinese, who nevertheless have remained stationary 
for thousands of years. Again some existing forms of 
life, — such as the Nautilus or the Lamp-shell — so-called 
1 persistent types,' have remained practically unaltered 
almost from the beginning of the geological record, 
while others — as the horse or the dog, for example — 
have progressed remarkably within a period that is by 
comparison recent. And as there are some individuals 
who are restless, enterprising and inventive to the end 
of their days, so there are others who early become 
supine and contented, the slaves of custom and hide- 
bound with habits, individuals whose chief concern is to 
avoid disturbance and let well alone. The simpler their 
standard of well-being and the less differentiated their 
environment the more monotonous their behaviour will 
be and the more inert they will appear. 

Now it is to be noted that the environment, resolved 
into its ultimate constituents, is by the pluralist assumed 
to be, as Leibniz taught, substantially the same, for all 
percipients, consisting, in fact, of the percipients them- 



Bionomics and Physionomics 61 

selves. But the degree and the extent to which clear 
and distinct perception is reached and retained, in 
other words the differentiation of the environment for a 
particular monad, will be proportionate to the organi- 
zation which it possesses and controls. It is thus not 
unreasonable to suppose that the gradation found within 
the known world of life extends indefinitely below it. 
If then certain of the simplest forms of life that we can 
detect have persisted throughout the gradual evolution 
of higher and higher forms ; and not merely so but if, 
further, the existence of such higher forms depends on 
that of lower, may we not fairly suppose that beyond 
our ken there are still simpler and more primitive 
forms capable of existing independently of the lowest 
that we know, and yet at the same time essential, and 
therefore prior, to the existence of these ? Such an 
assumption is akin to the bold hypothesis so confidently 
advanced by Leibniz in a well-known passage of his 
Monadology. " Each portion of matter," he says, 
" may be conceived as a garden full of plants and as 
a pond full of fish. But each branch of the plant, 
each member of the animal, each drop of its juices 
is also some such garden or pond. And, although 
the earth and the air separating the plants of the 
garden or the water separating the fish of the pond, 
be neither plant nor fish, nevertheless they also 
contain plants and fish but [these] for the most 
part too minute to be perceptible by us 1 ." 

On the important point just mentioned, Leibniz 
however does not insist. Though the elements, earth, 
air and water are essential to the plants and the plants 
1 Monadology, §§ 67, 68. 



62 Pluralism 

to the animals, the converse does not hold. Apart from 
parasitic and symbiotic forms, low-grade organisms do 
not require the presence of more developed organisms 
within their environment; and even if these are present, 
they do not bulk as differentiations of the environment 
for them, as they do for others higher in the scale. 
But at every stage the correlation of percipient and 
environment will still be found ; every order of plants 
or fish will have their appropriate garden or pond, 
which over against them is by comparison passive, 
whilst they over against it are by comparison active. 
It is this activity, this more or less spontaneous be- 
haviour, that according to Leibniz determines the 
character of every monad. From the physical stand- 
point it seems frequently possible to isolate special 
forms of matter, so that they remain chemically un- 
altered for an indefinite time. According to Leibniz's 
view what is done is only on a par with what the 
biologist might do by isolating a number of Protista 
in a globe of water. Let all the water evaporate and 
the life of its inhabitants is suspended and perhaps ex- 
tinguished. That some analogous change would not 
befall the said substances if all the rest of the universe 
should disappear, I take it no physicist would venture 
to say. The pampsychist, holding fast to the principle 
o£ continuity, maintains — I again repeat — that at all 
events there are no things wholly inert, devoid of all 
internal springs of action, and only mechanically related 
to each other. In a world of such things motion, that 
is to say change, would be impossible save through the 
intervention of a transcendent cause or prime mover. 
This difficulty, which the physicist allows, is, it is 



Is there an Inanimate World? 63 

contended, only to be escaped by regarding matter in 
more or less Leibnizian fashion, as but the manifestation 
of the interaction of perceptive and appetitive monads 
or entelechies. The attractions and repulsions of which 
the physicist speaks only metaphorically are, so the 
pampsychist maintains, to be taken literally, that is as 
implying impluses initiated and determined by feeling. 
Empedocles speculating in the fifth century B.C. is to be 
hailed as 'the Newton of organic nature,' for his principles 
of love and hate, Nature's Wahlverwandtschaften, or 
1 elective affinities,' have made the whole world kin 1 . 

Now, if we are prepared to admit that this pam- 
psychist or monadistic theory is in itself at least per- 
fectly conceivable and consistent, of a piece with and 
analogous to what we know and understand best, then 
it is contended in the next place that the facts which 
seem prima facie to make against it can be readily and 
reasonably explained. First of all we can all think of 
numberless instances in which what is sensibly simple 
and homogeneous is really extremely complex and 
heterogeneous. In fact we may fairly say that there 
is perhaps no case in which — either directly by closer 
inspection or indirectly by inference — we do not find 
some difference between objects that seem to be quali- 

1 Haeckel, Die Weltrathsel, 1900, pp. 259, 454. Cf. Renouvier, 
Le Personnalisme, 1903, p. 500. Also Zollner, Die Natur der Kometen, 
3 te Aufl. pp. 113 ff. "All the work performed by natural beings," says 
Zollner, "is determined by feelings of pleasure and pain, and that too 
in such a manner that the motions within a closed field of phenomena 
are related as they would be if they were carrying out the unconscious 
purpose of reducing the painful feelings to a minimum" (p. 119). — 
A view adopted by biologists, such as Nageli, and probably Reinke 
and Driesch, and by philosophers such as Paulsen and Wundt. 



64 Pluralism 

tatively and quantitatively the same. There seems then 
to be ample warrant a posteriori for the principle ad- 
vanced on a priori grounds by Nicholas of Cusa and 
afterwards endorsed by Leibniz. "There is nothing in 
the universe," said the former, "that does not enjoy a 
certain singularity, which is to be found in no other 
thing 1 ." In his correspondence with Samuel Clarke 
Leibniz wrote : — "There are no two indiscernible in- 
dividuals. A clever gentleman of my acquaintance, 
talking with me in the presence of Madame the 
Electress [of Hanover], thought that he could easily 
find two leaves entirely alike. The Electress challenged 
him to do so, and he went up and down a long time 
seeking in vain. [Even] two drops of water or of milk 
looked at through a microscope will be found to be 
diverse. This is an argument against atoms, which 
not less than a vacuum are repugnant to the principles 
of true metaphysics 2 ." 

But the modern pluralists do not usually follow out 
jthe principle of continuity as rigorously as Leibniz did. 
They hold with him that "there are never two beings 
which are perfectly alike and in which it is not possible 
to find an internal difference 3 ." But they do not 
usually maintain and indeed from their purely em- 
pirical standpoint they could not maintain that there is 
an actual infinity of monads. In particular they are in 
no way bound to assume that there are real beings 
corresponding to any concepts the physicist may find 

1 On Nicolaus Cusanus as a precursor of Leibniz see Latta, Leibniz, 
The Monadology, etc., 1898, p. 222 n. and the references there given. 

2 " Quatrieme Ecrit a Clarke," Opera, Erdmann's edition, p. 755. 

3 Monadology, § 9. 



The Principle of Continuity 65 

it convenient to frame regarding the ultimate consti- 
tuents of matter. Otherwise indeed, should the theory 
that matter is but a modification of the ether become 
established, that, it might be argued, would put an end 
to pluralism altogether, ether being real and not phe- 
nomenal. Pluralism in fact, as we have already seen, 
has no status at all save as a form of idealism or 
spiritualism : for it matter can only be phenomenal, it 
cannot be real. The tendency of science is to diminish 
the seeming variety of the world and ultimately to 
eliminate it. Qualities in the end are to be resolved 
into diverse arrangements of prime atoms, corpuscles, 
or electrons, differing in nothing but their positions 
and motions. For pluralism, on the other hand, 
quality, even haecceity — to use an old scholastic phrase 
— is vital. If there are real beings answering to the 
physicist's concept of ultimate atoms then indeed, if 
personal pluralism is to stand (I use the word 'personal' 
in the widest possible extent), this atomic pluralism can 
only be the outside appearance of so many active 
beings, each of which is something for itself. But all 
that the pluralist does is to appeal broadly to the 
principle of continuity and that, said Leibniz, "destroys 
atoms." In the real world we can nowhere find that 
exact similarity which the mathematician can readily 
conceive ; and the contention is that it nowhere exists. 
Appearances suggest it, it may be. But that leads us 
to a second point. 

There are statistical facts in plenty to show that, 
where large numbers are concerned, the conduct even 
of human beings presents aggregate results that are 
tolerably constant, in spite of the variety of the motives 

w. 5 



66 Pluralism 

determining the individual agents and the absence of 
any concerted action among them. Now many of the 
constants of science are -of the nature of statistical 
averages, and involve — as science interprets them — 
numbers enormously in excess of those of social 
statistics, while at the same time the individuals con- 
cerned must be indefinitely simpler. Starting from 
the statistics available in economics, the most scientific 
branch of sociology, and supposing that instead of 
trade returns from a score or two of countries we had 
returns from one or two thousand, the inhabitants of 
each being increased a myriad-fold and being also 
severally vastly more the creatures of habit than men 
now are, we can imagine such statistics would approxi- 
mate still more closely to those of the physicist. The 
physicist, like the statist, is always dealing with 
aggregates, but unlike the statist he finds the con- 
stituent individuals to be beyond his ken. The statist 
is aware that individual variations underlie his aggre- 
gates, but they do not interest him : the physicist is 
ignorant of those underlying his, and assumes that 
they do not exist 1 . Accordingly he rests content with 
abstract and general concepts that turn out in the 
end to be simply quantitative. But it is impossible 
to deduce quality from quantity or exhaustively to 
present concrete experience by means of any scheme 
of mathematical co-ordinates. 

Briefly then the pluralist at this juncture insists 
upon three points : — (i) We know that the appearance 
of uniformity and regularity is compatible with the 

1 On the features common to Nature and History, cf. Les Lois 
de P Imitation, by the late G. Tarde, 3 me edn, 1900, ch. 1. 



Uniformity and Statistics 67 

spontaneity of living agents •: (2) the uniformity and 
order which the physicist ascertains avowedly pertain 
to matter as phenomenal, i.e. as appearance — to the 
materia secunda, which Leibniz referred to confused per- 
ception; (3) some adequate ground for this appearance 
there must be. It is reasonable to assume, the pluralist 
then concludes, that this ground is analogous to that 
which we know to underlie the law and order of the 
historical world. Regarding this last point we ought 
to notice, in passing, that a two-fold interpretation is 
possible, the pluralisms is one possibility, the theist 
may prefer another. The mutual relation and the 
possible conciliation of these two views is a problem 
that still lies before us. Just now it is only important 
to observe that 'the theistic hypothesis' affords prima 
facie a more satisfactory explanation of Nature's laws 
— which, Laplace notwithstanding, are not self-ex- 
planatory — than pluralism at first sight seems to do. 
For we should expect the acts of a Supreme Being to 
show a more exact uniformity than the conjoint results 
of the actions of myriads of lowly monads severally 
and half unconsciously striving after mutual adjust- 
ment. We here come upon an aspect of pluralism, 
which — though referred to in the foregoing exposition 
— it will be well to consider in more detail and apart. 

Purposive action, it is commonly held, presupposes 
an established order, a reign of law, presupposes in fact 
that exact uniformity which naturalism formulates in 
mechanical terms. This is the physical basis which is 
supposed to furnish teleology with its indispensable 
irov (tto). But pluralism attempts to get behind all 
this. No doubt a man deliberating how to compass 



68 Pluralism 

some definite end, on which he has decided, may think 
out a chain of practical syllogisms in the way long ago 
described by Aristotle ; beginning with the last term 
in the causal series he works backwards till he reaches 
the first, some act that is which he is in a position 
immediately to perform 1 . But the practical syllogism, 
' acting on principle ' as we say, is an ideal ; we do 
not always act — above all, we do not begin acting — in 
this fashion. The earliest activity is apparently alto- 
gether impulsive, determined not by desire for future 
satisfaction but by aversion to a present ill. The stimulus 
of pain, as a veritable goad, leads to random efforts 
for relief. And relief, if it comes at all, may come in 
either of two ways. The situation may itself change 
for the better, or at length a fitting attitude or move- 
ment may be hit upon. In the former case the result 
might be attributed to pure chance : if the situation 
should recur the sufferer will be practically as ignorant 
and as helpless as before. But in reality all changes 
in the environment will be the result of conative im- 
pulses somewhere ; and from such of these as succeed, 
the agents, if we credit them with any retentiveness, 
learn something. A successful adjustment concurring 
with the release from pain will be specially impressive. 
In this way the evil and the remedy will be so far 
associated that on each repetition of the former the 
many tentative movements will become less, and the 
one effective movement more, pronounced, till at length 
it becomes an immediate, habitual, and eventually even 
a mechanical response. 

But this gradual development of purposive activity 

1 Nicomachean Ethics, ill. iii. 



Purposive Activity and Orderliness 69 

is mere psychological detail, upon which it is not 
necessary to enlarge here 1 . True, it will be said, but 
all such development presupposes ' the orderliness of 
things/ and pluralism, we understand, undertakes to 
explain how this orderliness has itself been developed. 
Order is heaven's first law, we say, but pluralism essays 
to get back of all this and to start from chaos, where 
we can count on no repetitions and therefore on no 
progress. This is unquestionably a formidable ob- 
jection, and what we shall have in the next lecture 
to consider is how the pluralists may attempt to 
meet it. 

1 Cf. the article, 'Psychology,' Ency. Brit, nth edn. 



LECTURE IV. 

THE CONTINGENCY IN THE WORLD. 

We left Pluralism charged with the hopeless 
attempt of bringing order out of chaos. But the 
notion of chaos is after all altogether a myth : as 
much a bugbear as a chimaera. " No one," says 
Lotze, "who means to think clearly can form any 
idea of the existence of such an infinite agglomeration 
of countless possibilities.... [Such an] abyss of in- 
definiteness is unthinkable, and any attempt to set 
distinctly before ourselves the origin of natural forms 
must start from some definite primitive state, which — 
because it was this and no other — from the very first 
excluded from actuality much in itself possible, while 
of much else on the other hand it contained not 
merely the bare possibility but a more or less im- 
mediate and urgent positive ground for its realisation 1 ." 
It is precisely such a definite primitive state that 
pluralism postulates, a totality of unique individuals 
each bent on self-preservation. But self here, we 
must remember, implies, not as in atomistic pluralism, 
a simple, unchangeable element that ex hypothesi must 
be conserved, though it does nothing and suffers 
nothing. What is here implied is a true self, whose 

1 MicrocostnuS) Bk iv. Ch. n., Eng. trans. Vol. i. p. 432. 



The Beginning of the IVorld not Chaos 71 

feeling and action vary with, though they are not ex- 
clusively determined by, its situation relatively to the 
rest. Such a definite situation will, as Lotze points out, 
then and there exclude certain possibilities and lead 
on immediately to the realisation of others. The 
mechanical theory too must postulate a primitive col- 
location of atoms which its laws can never explain ; 
but, these atoms being unalterable, the laws that for- 
mulate their successive changes of position are re- 
garded as also determinate and fixed. The individuals 
of spiritualistic pluralism, on the other hand, are held 
to be plastic and capable of development ; and the 
new relations that become established among them 
are therefore regarded as the direct consequences of 
such development. At the start then the order that 
is to be has still to become : everything is inchoate, 
but nothing chaotic, unless inexperience and innocence 
are the same as anarchy and original sin. 

The pluralists, we must remember, take all their 
bearings from the historical standpoint and endeavour 
to work backwards from the facts of human personality 
and social intercourse. Their mode of thought is 
frankly, though not crudely, anthropomorphic : hence 
such titles as Personalism, Personal Idealism, 
Humanism and the like, which one or other has 
adopted. Now in this personal domain, whether 
individual or social, we find orderliness and regularity 
in plenty. From this orderliness and regularity we 
may derive premisses, at once general and definite, 
for practical syllogisms : it affords an ample basis of 
reliable means for the realisation of the most varied 
ends, and it makes education and further experience 



72 The Contingency in the World 

always possible. But the whole of such development 
is the result of the conduct and behaviour, severally 
or collectively, of the persons concerned : none of it 
existed previously as the presupposition of such 
conduct. Other forms of order and regularity — we 
may call them lower forms — no doubt there were, but 
not these. Of such lower forms we may say that they 
were indispensable conditions of the higher forms that 
followed — indispensable conditions indeed, but not 
sufficient. The future is grounded on the past, it may 
be, but we cannot in history, as in science, infer the 
one from the other : we cannot anticipate the super- 
structure from a knowledge of the foundations, or 
prophesy whenever we can remember. Looking back 
then on the career of an individual or on the progress 
of a community we may distinguish, at any given 
point, on the one side the habits, tastes and dexterities 
already acquired or the customs, institutions and polity 
already established, and on the other the new and 
often unexpected development that followed upon these. 
We may express the relation between the two by 
adopting — and adapting — the old scholastic distinction 
of natura naturata and natura naturans. What is 
done forecloses some old possibilities and opens up 
new ones : Vulcan, who had spent his youth at the 
forge, could hardly hope to charm Olympus with 
Apollo's lyre, though he made a suit of armour worthy 
of the god of war : the Semites worsted in their 
struggles with Rome could no longer aspire to the 
supremacy of the world ; though, scattered everywhere 
and yet united, they still remain its masters in finance. 
What is done, natura naturata — the decisions made, 



Natura naturans and Natura naturata 73 

the habits formed, the customs fixed — constitutes at 
any stage the routine, the general trend of things, 
within which future possibilities lie. What is still 
to do, natura naturans, implies further spontaneity 
and growth ; new decisions to be taken, fresh experi- 
ments to be made, with their usual sequel of trial and 
error and possible eventual success ; happy thoughts 
or inspirations occurring to the individual ; and the 
rise of great men inaugurating new epochs for their 
race or for the world. Even Bacon, who was certainly 
sufficiently impressed by the supremacy of law, we 
find saying : Super datum corpus novam naturam, sive 
novas naturas generare et superinducere, opus et intentio 
est humanae potentiae x . How little this generating of 
new natures is to be regarded as the inevitable con- 
sequence of the antecedent routine is shown by the 
myths which attributed the earliest arts to the inter- 
vention of gods and heroes, Triptolemus, Prometheus, 
Athene, Apollo. 

If now we were to contemplate an individual's 
career or a nation's progress at a later stage the same 
distinction could still be made, only that the line 
dividing the lifeless routine from the ' increasing 
purpose ' would be drawn at a new point. The painful 
efforts and strange experiences of the past are now re- 
placed by such masterly facility and perfect familiarity 
as can serve as ' stepping-stones to higher things ' ; 
the reforms and liberties, so hardly achieved, are now 

1 Novum Organum, Vol. n. i. Kitchin's edn, p. 132. On this 
whole topic see the brilliant article, ' Great Men and their Environ- 
ment,' by that thorough-going pluralist, W. James, The Will to 
believe, pp. 216 ff. 



74 The Contingency in the World 

unquestioned, and so open up possibilities of ' nobler 
modes of life, with sweeter manners, purer laws.' If, 
on the other hand, we contemplate things at an earlier 
stage than that with which we began, the converse will 
hold. What we then found consolidated into habit or 
custom, as so much fixed routine, would still be fluent 
and so to say adolescent ; alternatives then finally 
determined would still be pending ; and much that 
later will be commonplace, still a marvel beyond the 
range of present surmise. Now this characteristic of 
the historical world the pluralist boldly generalises to 
the utmost. " All nature," to repeat a summary I have 
made elsewhere, " is regarded as plastic and evolving 
like mind : its routine and uniformity being explained 
on the analogy of habit and heredity in the individual, 
of custom and tradition in society ; while its variety is 
attributed to spontaneity in some form 1 ." " The 
one intelligible theory of the universe,''" a prominent 
pluralist tells us, "is that of objective [i.e., I take it, 
personal] idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate 
habits becoming physical laws 2 ." Evidence of such 
mechanization — that is, of what originally was spon- 
taneous and tentative becoming eventually automatic 
and regular — is forthcoming up to the very verge 
of our knowledge of whatever can be regarded as 
individual and unique at all. But though individuals 
other than conceptual ones are beyond the physicist's 
ken, evidence has long been accumulating even here 

1 ' Mechanism and Morals.' Adamson Lecture, Hibbert Journal \ 
1905, p. 92. 

2 C S. Peirce, 'The Architectonic of Theories,' Monist, Vol. I. 
1890, p. 170. 



Causal Efficiency and Causal Connexion 75 

to strengthen the analogy between inorganic and 
organic evolution regarded en bloc 1 . 

It will be helpful at this point to recall a distinction 
too often ignored or confused in current expositions of 
causation — the distinction between efficient cause and 
occasional cause. The former leads us to say : Every 
event has a cause, an efficient cause, the latter finds its 
meaning in the generalisation : The same (occasional) 
cause is followed invariably by the same effect. Here 
in fact the notion of cause is transformed into that 
of law, for it is only on the ground of such regular 
recurrence that causal connexion is affirmed. Causal 
efficiency on the other hand is at once assured for 
us on a single occurrence, if that be our own act ; and 
though the occasion recur never so often, the act 
need never be repeated. With inanimate objects the 
occasion inevitably determines the result : this is the 
meaning of law. Hence, as Kant in substance put 
it, life is the death of all natural philosophy, for "life 
means the capacity to act or change according to an 
internal principle," means, that is to say, the presence 
of an efficient cause 2 . Now "chance," we are told, 
"is opposed to law in this sense, viz. that what 
happens according to law may be predicted and 
counted on 3 " : in the same sense the conduct of living 
beings, i.e. historical events, are opposed to law. 
Thus what one person might regard as due to chance 
may be really due to the act of another. 

According to the pluralistic Weltanschauung then 
there are no laws antecedent to the active individuals 

1 Cf. e.g. Sir Norman Lockyer's Inorganic Evolution^ 1900, Bk v. 

2 Cf. Naturalism and Agnosticis?n y 3rd edn, Vol. 1. p. 177. 

3 Fleming, Vocabulary of Philosophy. 



76 The Contingency in the World 

who compose the world, no laws determining them, 
unless we call their own nature a law ; and then 
indeed the world would start with as many laws as 
there are individuals 1 . Such a view of course involves 
throughout an element of contingency such as we 
find in all personal affairs 2 . Some pluralists, very un- 
advisedly as I think, have identified this element 
with pure chance and even proposed to elevate it to 
the place of a guiding principle under the title of 
1 tychism/ — Tvyj] Kvfiepva Trdvra. But every act of a 
conative agent is determined by — what may, in a wide 
sense, be called — a motive, and motivation is incom- 
patible with chance, though in the concrete it be not 
reducible to law. 

Possibly the objection will still be pressed that 
if, as all psychology teaches, the recurrence of like 
situations is essential to any advance in experience, it 
is difficult to see how without a previously established 
'reign of law' experience could ever begin. In point 
of fact, even as things are now, with all the so-called 
laws of nature in full force, unless the range of an 
experient's distinguishable percepts and interests were 
restricted there could be no possibility of its advance 
in experience. We must postulate what I have called 
subjective selection, in other words we must assume 
that many of the changes that take place around it are 
for a given subject severally imperceptible and that 
to many that are perceptible it is entirely indifferent. 
Without such restriction the progress of science itself 
would be impossible. Thus, so far as our observations 
and means of measurement are concerned, the solar 

1 Cf. Lotze, Metaphysic, § 32. 

2 Cf. Supplementary Note I. 



Subjective Selection 77 

system is an isolated system : actually of course its 
motions are affected by those of all other stellar 
systems. But if the early astronomers had had to 
take these into account the complexity would have 
been beyond human powers to unravel. As it is, it 
has been remarked that if all the perturbations of the 
planets now known had been known to Kepler he 
could never have discovered the form of their orbits : 
as it was the problem proved one of colossal pro- 
portions and occupied him during ten years. 

But from the pluralist standpoint the term imper- 
ceptible is not accurate : the whole universe is perceived 
by every percipient. But such perception may be con- 
fused, as Leibniz used to say, or undifferentiated to 
an indefinite extent. The presence of this indefinite 
background of confused or undifferentiated objects, 
though it is not attended to and determines no special 
response, is still of vital importance : for example, we 
do not feel the pressure of the atmosphere, yet its 
absence would be fatal. The development of ex- 
perience however depends entirely on differentiated 
presentations and these in turn are commensurate to 
the position already attained. The shoeblack stationed 
by the Royal Exchange will welcome a muddy day, 
but is unperturbed by the fluctuations of the market ; 
the amoeba, confined to a drop of stagnant water, has 
only to do with the tiny fragments that float within it, 
and need not bewilder itself about the weather forecast. 
So too the atom, if it be real at all, that is, anything 
for itself, has only to mind its partners in the dance 
and avoid collisions : as far as it is concerned, the 
continuity of things reduces all beyond its infinitesi- 
mally narrow field to a permanent background for it 



78 The Contingency in the World 

devoid of change : mechanically expressed, all its action 
is so-called contact action. 

To resume then, the purposive act or deliberate 
intention of one agent may for the experience of a 
second be a mere happening or accident. It may 
befall contrary to all that the latter regarded as possible 
and independently of all his aims ; but it still remains 
the outcome of another's purpose, is neither causeless 
nor aimless. Though contingent to others it was not 
in itself a case either of chance or necessity 1 . But as 
bearing on the objection that we have been con- 
sidering, there are two or three characteristics of a 
pluralistic world, a world partly fixed and partly fluent, 
partly naturata, partly naturans, which it may be well 
to emphasize as consequences of the contingency that 
such a world entails. 

First, since for pluralism there are no natural laws 
so to say ' in force ' from the beginning, but on the 
contrary all natural laws are evolved, there will be no 
rigorous and mechanical concatenation of things such 
as naturalism is wont to assume : the fixity, so far as it 
is real, will embody the result of experience ■ so far as 
it is apparent, it will be due, as we have seen, to the 
statistical constancy of large numbers. But, again, 
in a world consisting of finite individuals no single 
individual and no community of such can foresee all 
the consequences of do what they : over and above 
what was intended much will result that was not 
intended. While chipping his flint instruments or 
polishing his weapons of wood the savage, it is sup- 
posed, may incidentally have generated the sparks or 
heat which he sooner or later turned to account for the 
1 Cf. Lectt. xiii. and xiv. 



1 Heterogony of Ends ' 79 

production of fire. When certain Phoenician sailors 
kindled a fire on the seashore, their sole purpose was 
to cook their food, but among the dead embers they 
presently discovered a mass of molten glass produced 
by the fusion of the potashes and the sand ; and so a 
useful art arose. When primitive men scratched rude 
pictures on mammoth tusks they did not foresee the 
passage of pictures into hieroglyphs or ideograms and 
of these into phonograms or an alphabet. Again, no 
one deliberately excogitated such institutions as human 
language, courts of justice or constitutional govern- 
ment. Each step in the progress made realised some 
unexpected advantage and made a new step possible ; 
but the progress as a whole involved no such practical 
syllogism as the old theories of convention and contract 
naively assumed. The literal meaning of such words 
as ' discovery ' and ' invention ' bears unmistakeable 
testimony to the truth of this. Such 'heterogony of 
ends,' as Wundt has called it 1 , the objective realisation 
of adaptations that were never subjectively intended, 
must have played a yet more conspicuous part in the 
earliest phases of evolution. As the result of what are 
aptly called blind impulses, whether due to positive 
pain or to mere restlessness, the successful individual 
or race gradually raises itself in the scale of life, 
shows a ' tendency to progression,' function perfecting 
structure, though the end attained may never be fore- 
seen. As I have said elsewhere and anticipating 
Wundt : " The tendency at any one moment is simply 

1 System der Philosophie, 1889, S. 337. But the whole idea is 
clearly formulated by Hegel : cf. his Philosophic der Geschichte, 1837, 
S. 30. 



80 The Contingency in the World 

towards more life, simply growth ; but this process of 
self-preservation imperceptibly but steadily modifies 
the self that is preserved. The creature is bent only 
on filling its skin ; but in doing this as pleasantly as 
may be, it gets a better skin to fill, and accordingly 
seeks to fill it differently. All that is required is that 
to advance to a higher level of life shall on the whole 
be more pleasurable or less painful than to remain 
behind. Now this condition seems provided, without 
any need for a clear prevision of ends or any feeling 
after improvement or perfection as such, simply by 
the waning of familiar pleasures and by the zest of 
novelty 1 ." 

Since, as I have said, the pluralistic view of the 
world necessarily involves an element of contingency 
in its very idea of a finite Many mutually striving for 
the best modus vivendi, it must be allowed that the 
actual presence — prima facie at least — of such con- 
tingency in the world of our experience is so far an 
argument for the pluralisms position : absolutism leaves 
no place for this contingency. Some amplification of 
this point seems then to be relevant and in order. In 
the first place an instructive analogy may be drawn 
between the diversity in tools, weapons, and processes, 

1 Ency. Brit. s.v. 'Psychology,' 1886, nth edn, p. 585. How- 
ever the Lamarckians and Darwinians may settle their differences, 
it is agreed on all hands that there are at any rate no really fortuitous 
variations or mutations. The pluralist, of course, is positive that the 
ultimate explanation is to be found only in the conative impulses of 
sentient individuals. It is worth noting by the way that even 
Weismann at length so far agrees with this as to admit that " the 
direction of the variation of a part must be determined by its utility," 
cf. his article, 'Germinal Selection,' Monist, 1896, p. 267. 



Instances from the Useful Arts 81 

which different races of primitive men have devised 
for the same purpose, and the diversity in the natural 
adaptations, instincts or contrivances by which in 
different animals or plants the same functions are 
discharged. Thus among men centrifugal force is 
turned to account by some races who make slings, 
while others avail themselves of it in their use of the 
bolas or the lasso. Some shoot with bows, others 
with blow-guns, while yet others mainly use javelins, 
throwing-sticks or boomerangs. Canoes are made in 
various parts of the world from hollowed tree-trunks, 
from twigs and bark, from skins stretched over whale- 
bone, from a wooden framework covered with matting 
or with reeds, and in yet other ways. Exhilarating 
drinks are obtained in some cases by fermenting fruits 
— grapes, apples, dates — in others by fermenting grains, 
such as wheat, barley, rice ; or again by fermenting 
honey or milk. And doubtless in the great majority 
of these instances the discovery or invention was the 
result of a combination of happy accident and happy 
thought rather than of deliberate design and fore- 
thought. But what we have specially to observe is 
the identity of the need and the diversity of the 
materials which in different cases are turned to account 
to meet it. The collocation of the two can only be 
regarded as contingent. 

And the like holds good in numberless instances in 
the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Thus the bird 
owes its power of flight to those enormously developed 
scales with frayed edges, which we call feathers, that 
are attached to its hands and fore-arm. In the bat 
this apparatus is replaced by a stretched membrane 



82 The Contingency in the IVorld 

extending between vastly elongated fingers and fring- 
ing the sides of its body. In insects again the so- 
called wings are only physiologically limbs : morpho- 
logically they are but flattened folds of the integument, 
so to say extemporized wings. In the courting season 
some animals attract one another by sounds that are 
variously produced in different species — by voice, as 
with frogs and song-birds, by stridulation, as with 
crickets and the cicada, or by tapping on foreign sub- 
stances, as with certain wood-peckers and the death- 
watch ; some attract by their brilliant coloration, as in 
certain apes and the peacock, or by phosphorescence, 
as with the glow-worm ; and others by the production 
of peculiar odours, as with the musk-rat and deer. 
Some escape their enemies by the celerity of their 
movements, others by death-like stillness ; some by 
conspicuous coloration and a nauseous taste, others by 
sombre hues resembling their inanimate surroundings ; 
some by fetid exhalations, others by spines or a hard 
encasement. Plants in some cases trust to the wind 
— as we aptly say — to disseminate their seeds, which 
are provided with vanes or fluffy plumes, or are of 
dust-like minuteness ; the seeds of others attach them- 
selves by hooks or grapnels to the fur of passing 
quadrupeds ; while those of others are violently pro- 
jected by variously contrived springs. Some again 
pass through animals who have eaten their pulpy- 
envelopes, while others encased in a hard shell float 
away on the water 1 . 

To suppose that all this variety should have been 
directly created for variety's sake, 'almost like toys 

1 These and abundant like instances will be found more fully 
described by Darwin, Origin of Species, Ch. vi. et passim. 



Illustrations from Nature 83 

in a shop,' to use Darwin's phrase, is indeed, as he 
urges, an ' incredible view,' as incredible as the view 
would be that the similar variety we find in human con- 
trivances was itself supernaturally preordained instead 
of being the contingent result of differently situated 
individuals having to work with different materials to 
arrive at the same end. To make this analogy 
clear it may suffice to consider the instance just now 
mentioned, that of flight. The feathers of the bird 
are homologous to, i.e. genetically connected with, the 
lizard's scales : the subsequent modification of those 
attached to the wings and tail so as to subserve flight 
has no connexion with the original function of feathers 
as a dermal covering, which remains their sole function 
for the most part. It is just to the coincidence of 
their special plasticity with the new conditions of 
nascent bird life that their development is to be 
attributed. Bats are scientifically called Cheiroptera 
or hand-winged, but the fore limb in the adjacent 
order, the Insectivora, is primarily adapted to running 
or climbing, and again is modified in the moles, in 
a direction the precise opposite to that of flight, 
viz. burrowing. But the family of the Insectivora 
nearest akin to the bats, consisting of the single genus, 
Galeopithecus, and some of the rodents, the order next 
adjacent, u are assisted in jumping by a kind of para- 
chute, which consists of a cutaneous expansion, the 
patagium, stretched between the limbs on each side 1 ." 
The bat's flight is but a development of this habit. 
To secure this result the one means available was the 
elongation of the fingers of the hand as a frame- 
1 Sedgwick, A Students Text-book of Zoology, Vol. n. p. 642. 

6—2 



84 The Contingency in the World 

work for the greatly extended patagium or elastic 
membrane, the original function of the hand being 
sacrificed almost entirely. The origin of the insect's 
wings is, I understand, still something of a problem. 
Professor J. A. Thomson writes about them : — " It 
seems plausible to compare them to the tracheal out- 
growths seen in some aquatic larvae, and to regard 
them as primarily respiratory, and secondarily loco- 
motor. One may venture to suggest that the additional 
respiratory efficiency derived from such outgrowths 
would increase the total activity of the insect, and 
more or less directly lift it into the air 1 ." And so, 
mutatis mutandis, other instances of biological develop- 
ment may be explained. 

"It certainly is true," as Darwin has said, "that new 
organs appearing as if created for some special pur- 
pose, rarely or never appear in any being 2 ." Imagine 
that a clock had been the first machine invented by 
men and that all other machines had to be modelled 
on this type. As it is, mechanisms for very different 
purposes are formed on this type, and human efforts, if 
necessarily restricted to it, would doubtless in time 
gradually devise many more by means of modifications 
analogous to those which Nature displays in adapting 
a given type of structure to very various conditions of 
life. Or again if we imagine that instead of a clock 
some other machine, say a loom, had been that from 
which the start was made, all subsequent machines 
being modelled on that. Many varieties of this form 
of mechanism too already exist, and it is not too much 
to assume that if necessary it could be indefinitely 

1 Chambers' s Encyclopaedia, Vol. vi. p. 167. 

2 Origin of Species, 6th edn, p. 156. 



Fixity of Type and Variety of Conditions 85 

varied. Such is in fact the picture that the organic 
world presents to us. As Darwin puts it: "All 
organic beings have been formed on two great laws 
— Unity of Type, and the Conditions of Life. By 
unity of type is meant that fundamental agreement 
in structure which we see in organic beings of the 
same class, and which is quite independent of their 
habits of life 1 ." Let us consider for a moment two 
such types — say the arthropod and the vertebrate. 
Widely as these two types differ we find some species 
of each adapted to every condition of life in every 
variety of climate and locality, mountain heights or sub- 
terranean caves, the surface of the earth or the depths 
of the sea. We find creatures of each type flying, 
swimming, diving, or burrowing, active by night or 
by day, some sociable, some solitary, some preying 
upon specific living animals, others feeding more or 
less indiscriminately on the corpses of the dead ; 
or vegetable feeders, some confined to specific plants, 
others to particular parts or tissues, and so on ; for an 
exhaustive specification of the conditions of life to 
which these two types are alike adapted is impossible. 
Even when we take one of the leading modifications 
of each type — insects and birds, for example — the 
range of conditions is but slightly restricted. 

A collateral consequence of this adaptation of a 
fixed type to various conditions of life is perhaps 
worth notice in passing. I refer to the awkward and 
grotesque, even the ludicrous and hideous forms of 
some plants and animals. The graceful shape and 
agile movements of the horse, the gazelle, the squirrel, 
1 Op. at., p. 166. 



86 The Contingency in the World 

for instance, have been universally admired. Com- 
pared with them such creatures as the camel, the 
sloth and the wart-hog have been reckoned among 
Nature's abortions. But among less familiar animals 
there are many more ungainly or ill-favoured than 
these, as such scientific names as Diabolus ursinus, 
Moloch horridus, Ckimaera monstrosa, suggest. These 
seeming anomalies did not escape the notice of the 
earlier naturalists. Buffon, for example, after the 
manner of Leibniz, imagines Nature setting before 
herself all possible forms and selecting first of all 
the most beautiful and harmonious, but " into the 
midst of this magnificent spectacle," he tells us, "some 
unfinished (negligdes) products and some less happy 
forms, thrown like the shadows in a picture, appear 
to be the remnants of those ill-assorted designs and 
those disparate compositions which she has only 
allowed to remain in order to give us a more extended 
idea of her projects 1 ." Theologians too have been 
exercised by these blemishes which seem everywhere 
to obtrude themselves, marring the beauty and de- 
tracting from the perfection of Nature. After an 
enumeration of a whole string of these ' veritably 
hellish shapes,' as they have been called — toadstools, 
thorn-apples, scorpions, rattlesnakes, &c. &c. — it has 
been asked : — " Can such an appalling, Callotesque 
fancy be attributed to God : can he be held capable 
of creating the hateful 2 ? " The true cause of such 

1 Histoire naturelle; Des Oiseanx, t. vm. 1781, a propos of the 
Stilt (Himantopus candidus). 

2 Cf. Rosenkranz, ' Die Verklarung der Natur,' B. Bauer's Zeitsch. 
f. spekulative TAeo/ogie, 11. 1837, p. 262. 



The Grotesque in Nature 87 

deformities certain theologians have preferred to find 
in man's alienation from God and the consequent 
reaction upon nature, of which he was the crown and 
keystone, that his fall entailed. Whatever may be 
thought of their explanation of the fact of Nature's 
aesthetic defects, the recognition of the fact itself by 
such thinkers is noteworthy. 

But the contingency in the world presents itself in 
a still more striking light when we follow out the con- 
sequences of the pluralist theory of the world. Accord- 
ing to that, as we have seen, the world consists solely 
of finite individuals primarily dominated by private 
ends and for whom self-preservation is the first law 
of life. Each species develops for itself and never 
directly either for the advantage or the detriment of 
others ; though such incidental consequences to one 
species may arise continually from the development of 
another, as we have already seen. In fact, evolution 
in large measure consists in adaptations to meet these 
consequences, so as to avoid or counteract as far as 
possible those that are harmful and as far as possible 
to avail of, or cooperate with, the rest. But such 
processes in the main and for long — so long, that is, 
as they are natural processes — are purely egoistic, not 
altruistic. Moreover the apostolic saying, God is no 
respecter of persons, turns out to be true of Nature in 
a way which seems entirely to disprove the cardinal 
maxim of the old natural theology that all the lower 
creatures exist for the sake of man. Man is un- 
doubtedly ' the paragon of animals,' the highest link 
in a vast chain, but it is a chain in which one and the 
same right to live belongs to all. I recall a revolting 



88 The Contingency in the IVorld 

sight that I saw in my youth, which rudely shocked 
my preconceived notions of the fitness of things. That 
man should slay and eat creatures lower in the scale 
than himself, that the song-thrush should feed on worms 
and snails or the gorgeously tinted kingfisher dart into 
the thick of a shoal of silly minnows to secure food 
for himself and his brood — all this seemed reasonable 
enough ; for here the lower subserved the higher. But 
once I chanced to see three young rabbits playfully gam- 
bolling, heedless of a cold clammy snake who stealthily 
glided forward, and struck first one and then another 
till after a few momentary convulsions all lay stretched 
and dead ; whereupon the sluggish reptile, without 
the faintest show of emotion, pleasurable or otherwise, 
proceeded slowly to suck down one after another these 
pets of my childhood — then indeed I felt that the world 
so far was neither well nor wisely nor beautifully 
ordered. Such an incident, however individually im- 
pressive, is, of course, utterly trivial compared with 
the terrible ravages, formerly regarded as the scourges 
of an offended deity, which we now know are wrought 
by the lowest forms of life with which we have any 
exact acquaintance, whereby not only our flocks and 
fields are continually devastated but millions of our 
fellow-men are painfully swept away. It is not however 
the physical evil, the dysteleology of all this that is 
now in point, but simply the fact that there is no 
necessary connexion between worth of life as we 
estimate it and fitness to survive in the evolutionist 
sense. In the physical struggle for existence worth 
does not count : distinguished men like Raphael, 
Howard, Keats and Hegel succumbed to microscopic 



The Natural Right to live 89 

bacilli, and it is conceivable that the whole human 
race might thus ignobly disappear. Such anomalies 
seem even a priori to be an obvious, almost an in- 
evitable outcome of pluralism, and though perhaps not 
insuperable, still as far as they go, they are an argu- 
ment in favour of the pluralisms and a difficulty for the 
theist's position. 

But further the contingency in the world in general 
seems to involve that the existence of mankind at all 
is itself but a special contingency. In the case of 
other living kinds few persons would hesitate to admit 
this. According to the psalmist indeed God " causeth 
the grass to grow for the cattle... the high mountains 
are for the wild goats, the rocks are a refuge for the 
conies." But what is at all events immediately evident 
is rather the pluralist position, that these creatures are 
adapted to their conditions of life, not their conditions 
of life to them. The existence of grass does not 
depend on that of the cattle or goats or conies that 
browse upon it 1 , but contrariwise these creatures are 
variously modified to derive their sustenance from the 
grass, according as it is found on plains, on crags or 
in hollows. Similarly it is argued that trees came into 
existence and continue to exist independently of the 
birds that there make their nests or of the various 
other creatures that live among their branches. So 
had there been no forests there could have been no 
apes, but the existence of forests is due primarily to 
the conditions of vegetable life and not to the needs 
of animals. Assuming man's simian ancestry — and 
assuredly, as Darwin has said, " if man had not been 
1 Cf. Lect. in. p. 62. 



90 The Contingency in the JVorld 

his own classifier, he would never have thought of 
founding a separate order for his own reception" — 
then the mode of life of those climbing, chattering, 
inquisitive denizens of the woods gradually led up to 
his wonderful hand and erect posture, his power of 
speech and capacity for knowledge. First the presence 
of trees made the Quadrumana or four-handed primates 
possible, and then the advance of the higher forms 
among these beyond the confines of the forest ushered 
in the two-handed primates or Bimana with their 
bipedal mode of progression. Some fragments of one 
of the latest of the ' missing links ' in this chain were 
said to have been discovered about ten years ago 
among some volcanic ash in the island of Java, the so- 
called Pithecanthropus erectus, and Professor Haeckel 
had previously thought it becoming to entertain his 
scientific readers with a fanciful picture of the family 
group under the title Pithecanthropus alalus. 

No doubt it is the psychological gulf rather than 
any biological gap between the speechless man-apes 
and Homo sapiens that is most impressive : it is not 
the physical difference but the mental difference that 
is so profound. This glaring psychological discon- 
tinuity between man and brute, as we know them, has 
led thinkers of every age and school to regard the 
origin of mankind and even of every individual man 
as something more or less supernatural, not wholly 
explicable by the ordinary processes that suffice to 
explain the nature and development of the lower 
animals. In the Mosaic account of creation, " God 
said, Let us make man in our image, after our like- 
ness " : here this difference is distinctly recognised. 



The gulf between Man and Brute 91 

It was this difference again that led Aristotle to regard 
the rational principle common to all men as not con- 
joined like sense and phantasy with bodily organs, not 
naturally generated like these, but as wholly separable 
from the body and divinely infused from without after 
the commencement of the bodily life. It was this 
difference that checked Descartes too from applying to 
man his famous automaton theory, which seemed to 
him adequate to explain the behaviour of brutes : in 
man alone he was constrained to allow that a soul 
is united with the animal machine. Even Leibniz, 
regardless of his cardinal principle of continuity, was 
driven to admit a difference in kind between the souls 
of animals and the spirits of men, a difference so great 
that he compares the relation of God to the animals 
with that of an inventor to his machine, but God's 
relation to men he compares to that of a prince to his 
subjects or a father to his children. At the moment 
of birth he supposed that God gave reason to each 
soul "by a special act or by a kind of transcreation 1 ." 
Finally — to take one more example specially inter- 
esting in connexion with our present topic — we have 
Mr Wallace, whose name is so honourably associated 
with Darwin's, firmly maintaining that the theory of 
natural selection, which they independently promul- 
gated, is insufficient to account for the development of 
man. As the existence of the poodle or the pouter 
pigeon is due to man's interference with the working 
of natural selection so, Mr Wallace assumes, the 
existence of man is to be attributed to a similar inter- 

1 Theodicee, § 91. 



92 The Contingency in the World 

ference of some superior or supreme intelligence. In 
short, as one of his ablest critics concisely puts it, 
Mr Wallace's view amounts to saying that " our brains 
are made by God and our lungs by natural selection" 
and that, in point of fact, " man is God's domestic 
animal 1 ." Still this is something of a parody, and it 
cannot be denied that Mr Wallace's hypothesis is a 
perfectly legitimate one. But is it necessary ? 

In common with the other supernatural explanations 
of man as rational animal, that of Mr Wallace recognises 
the presence of the two factors which rationality and 
animality imply ; but all alike entirely refrain from 
inquiring whether sociology may not account for the 
one at least as completely as biology accounts for the 
other. Reason is not correlated to an organ in the 
way that sight and locomotion are : so far Aristotle 
was right; it comes from without and is not generated. 
Had the most transcendent genius been left to grow 
up wild in the woods he would certainly never have 
attained to reason. On the other hand no biologist 
would pretend to find in difference of organization the 
equivalent of the vast interval between the genius and 
the savage. The difference then between Homo 
alalus and Homo sapiens is not a biological difference : 
in short for biology there is no such species as Homo 
sapiens. This is now generally allowed. But then so 
far there is no case against the contingency of man's 
origin biologically considered : not his lungs only but 
his brain also or rather his entire frame may be re- 
garded as equally the outcome of a pluralistic evolution. 

1 Cf. Wallace, Natural Selection, 1891, p. 205 n. 



Contingency and Individuals 93 

Let us now consider the sociological side. Cut off 
from society entirely the individual, we have seen, 
never attains to sapience at all ; also the more advanced 
the social medium in which he lives the more advanced 
on the average his intelligence and humanity. Society 
of course presupposes language as the instrument of 
communicating and accumulating knowledge : without 
it a tribe of men would be no better than a pack of 
wolves or a herd of deer. But there are few nowadays 
who imagine that speech was directly imparted to our 
first parents by some supernatural instructor just as 
it was afterwards taught by them to their children. 
Though we have no precise knowledge concerning 
its original acquisition we know enough to be satisfied 
that it developed gradually out of cries and gestures. 
For curiosity, imitativeness and excitability even the 
existing primates exceed all other animals except 
man. As regards the sociological side of man's 
origin then, the advance from animality to rational 
personality through inter-subjective intercourse, there 
is, it must be confessed, prima facie, neither any definite 
evidence nor any absolute need for assuming super- 
natural interference. The progress of knowledge and 
cooperation shows, so long as we can trace it, the same 
contingency, the same ' heterogony of ends ' that 
characterize biological development. 

But if the existence of particular species, mankind 
included, can be regarded as prima facie contingent, 
still more obviously will contingency pertain to the 
existence of particular individuals, the great men who 
have often seemed to direct the course of human 
history also included. There is no need for detailed 



94 The Contingency in the IVorld 

illustration here, but it is worth notice that this con- 
tingency is threefold; in respect, viz. of the individual's 
parentage, his nativity, and his survival to maturity. 
Those who breed and rear our domestic plants and 
animals take special pains to direct and control these 
circumstances, replacing nature's contingency by ideals 
of their own ; and daring innovators like Plato and the 
late Sir Francis Galton have even proposed to apply 
the same ' eugenic ' methods to the human race. Of 
" Eugenics," Galton recently said that it " dealt with 
what was more valuable than money or lands, namely, 
with natural inheritance of high character, capable 
brains, fine physique and vigour... It aimed at the 
evolution and preservation of high races and it well 
deserved to be strictly enforced 1 ." Compared with 
those practices and this possibility it would, I believe, 
be hard to think of anything that sets the seeming 
contingency in the world in a more striking light. 
But history suggests endless similar reflexions, all trite 
enough to be sure yet none the less true. Had Letitia 
Ramolino not been so beautiful, some one has said, 
there would have been no Napoleon Bonaparte. The 
infant Isaac Newton, puny and prematurely born, was 
not expected to live many hours ; how many potential 
geniuses, it may be asked, succumbed to the untimely 
death that he barely escaped ? 

But as regards the physical world at all events it 
was long supposed that a pre-established harmony, a 
complete unitary system could be safely assumed. 
Long after the Ptolemaic astronomy — with its primum 
mobile, its crystalline spheres, its firmament of stars, 
1 Nature, Vol. lxxi. p. 401. 



Astronomy and Physics 95 

the several planets with the sun and moon all revolving 
in concentric circles round the earth — had given place 
to that of Copernicus, it was still believed that there 
was somewhere a great central sun round which the 
entire stellar universe revolved. But this notion too has 
been exploded. " So far as we can judge at present," 
writes Professor Young, " it is most likely that the 
stars are moving, not in regular closed orbits around 
any centre whatever, but rather as bees do in a swarm, 
each for itself, under the action of the predominant 
attraction of its nearest neighbours. The solar system 
is an absolute monarchy with the sun supreme. The 
great stellar system appears to be a republic, without 
any such central, unique, and dominant authority. 
Here perturbation prevails over regularity, and 'in- 
dividualism ' is the method of the greater system of 
stars, as solar despotism is that of the smaller system 
of planets 1 ." 

Turning from stars to atoms we find a similar change 
of view. The five regular solids of Plato's cosmogony, 
the hard, massy corpuscles of Lucretius and Newton, 
the 'manufactured articles,' severally identical, ingener- 
able, and immutable, of Herschel and Maxwell, are all 
disappearing to make room for a theory of chemical 
evolution, which recognises degrees of simplicity and 
stability but finds no forms absolutely elementary or 
absolutely permanent. The results of spectroscopic 
investigations conjoined with the recently discovered 
phenomena of radio-activity are, as Sir Norman Lockyer 
says, "on all-fours with the geological record... We 

1 C. A. Young, A Text-book of General Astronomy, 1893, pp. 461, 
5i4« 



96 The Contingency in the World 

note the same changes of form, sudden breaks in 
forms, disappearances of old, accompanied by appear- 
ances of new forms ; and with these we have to associate 
...a growth of complexity... that is to say, the existence 
of our chemical elements as we know them does not 
depend upon their having been separately manufactured 
...they are the result of the working of a general law, 
as in the case of plants and animals 1 ." 

1 Inorganic Evolution, 1900, pp. 164, 166. 



LECTURE V. 

EVOLUTION AS EPIGENESIS AND EQUILIBRATION. 

In spite of the contingency which pluralism leads 
us to expect, and which, in fact, we have found every- 
where to characterize the world, there is at any rate 
one principle that from the pluralistic standpoint may 
be regarded as a priori. As a necessary consequence 
of the interaction of a plurality of individuals, intent on 
self-betterment as well as self-conservation, there should 
be a general tendency to diminish the mere contingency 
of the world and to replace it by a definite progression. 
And this, so far as our experience goes, we find to be 
in fact the case. Such progression we are wont now- 
adays to speak of as evolution. 

But widely as the term ' evolution ' is used, it is 
rarely defined ; hence it is often without misgiving 
applied to processes that are diametrically opposed, 
to the differentiation of a unity and to the integration 
of a plurality. The history of this term is worth a 
moment's consideration. We begin with the literal 
sense, the unrolling of a scroll or volume, whereby 
what lies written inside it is no longer latent but laid 
bare — becomes patent and evident. This as a figure 
is then transferred to the processes of thought ; and 
we talk of evolving or explicating whatever may be 
implied or involved in a concept, an argument or a 
theory. We find it later applied with a similar 



98 Evolution as Epigenesis and Equilibration 

meaning to the supposed unfolding of an organism 
regarded as completely pre-existing in miniature 
within the germ. Such was the theory of biological 
evolution or preformation advocated by Leibniz. And 
throughout the 18th century this was the prevalent 
view among biologists and philosophers alike ; but now 
it is all but superseded by the very different theory of 
epigenesis or new formation ; for which nevertheless 
the term evolution is still retained. So different are 
the two theories in fact, that the earlier, strictly evolu- 
tional view would — unless essentially modified — render 
the Darwinian doctrine of the origin of species 
impossible. For according to that earlier theory "the 
germ was more than a marvellous bud-like miniature 
of the adult, it necessarily included in its turn the next 
generation, and this the next — in short all future 
generations. Germ within germ, in ever smaller 
miniature, after the fashion of an infinite juggler's box, 
was the corollary logically appended to this theory of 
preformation 1 ." The successive unfolding of such a 
system of emboitement or involution, though the ne 
plus ultra of evolution literally understood, is then the 
direct negative of evolution as we understand it to-day. 
According to this later theory each new organism is 
not an 'educt' but a 'product/ to use Kantian phrases: 
its parts are in no sense present in the embryo but are 
gradually organized, one after another in due order, as 
the term epigenesis implies and as Harvey, who first 
used the term, prophetically maintained. — It is now 
known too that in this progressive differentiation the 
individual retraces the main stages through which the 
1 Geddes and Thomson, The Evolution of Sex, p. 84. 



Epigenesis not strict Evolution 99 

species has advanced: as Haeckel in technical language 
concisely puts it : Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. 

Such a theory of evolution is in all respects con- 
formable to the pluralistic standpoint. The diverging 
lines of phylogenetic ascent indicate the various 
directions by which different species have extended 
and improved their adjustment to the environment : 
here all is history, the result of effort, trial and error, 
here we have adventure and ultimate achievement ; in 
a word natura naturans, as I said before. The suc- 
cessive stages of ontogenetic development, on the other 
hand, though each step is an advance for the individual 
and justifies Harvey's term epigenesis ; yet from the 
point of view of the species it is mainly recapitulation, 
palingenesis as Haeckel has called it : here then we 
have on the whole only routine, heredity as the result 
of organic memory or habit, in other words, as natura 
naturata. The preformation theory on the other hand 
is only compatible with a singularistic, or as Professor 
James has called it, a block universe, in which 

With earth's first clay they did the last man knead 
And then of the last harvest sowed the seed: 
On the first morning of creation wrote 
What the last dawn of reckoning shall read. 

Though this theory seems, so far as biology is con- 
cerned, to have originated in a certain faulty observation 
of Malpighi 1 , the anatomist, it probably owed its long 
supremacy in large measure to the advocacy of philo- 
sophers, Regis, Malebranche, and especially Leibniz. 
For Leibniz indeed it was but a corollary of his 

1 Cf. Huxley's article 'Evolution,' Ency. Brit, nth edn, Vol. x. 
p. 29^/. 

7—2 



i oo Evolution as Epigenesis and Equilibration 

doctrine of pre-established harmony, that hopeless 
theological pendant of his pluralism 1 . Such a theory 
of evolution is only appropriate to a singularistic 
philosophy, I have said ; but also it is the only theory 
of evolution which truly deserves the name. For 
evolution, strictly taken, presupposes a fundamental 
unity, in which all that is eventually evolved or dis- 
closed was involved or contained from the first. Logic 
furnishes us with the clearest instance of evolution in 
this sense, and it was to the unfolding or explication of 
logical content that, as already said, the metaphor of 
evolution was first applied. The following passage 
from Hegel's Encyclopaedia is in point here: — "The 
movement of the notion is development : by which 
that only is explicitly affirmed which is already of itself 
present." The development of an organism was for 
Hegel the counterpart of this logical development, and 
he commends the so-called 'box-within-box' hypothesis 
of Leibniz and Bonnet for " perceiving that in the 
process of development the notion keeps to itself, and 
only gives rise to alteration of form, without making 
any addition in point of content 2 ." But it was not the 
individual organism regarded apart but rather the 
entire universe that appeared to Hegel — Hegel the 
logician, that is to say — as just the realisation of such 

1 Considerations sur le Principe de Vie, Erdmann's Leib?iitii 
Opera, pp. 429 ff. 

2 Encyclopaedia, i. § 161. Cf. also the following: — Die Welt- 
geschichte ist die Darstellung, wie der Geist zu dem Bewusstsein 
dessen kommt, was er an sich bedeutet; und wie der Keim die 
ganze Natur des Baumes...in sich tragt, so enthalten auch schon 
die ersten Spuren des Geistes virtualiter die ganze Geschichte. Phil, 
der Gesch., Einleitung, p. 21. 



Pluralism rejects strict Evohition 101 

a dialectical evolution. It is an immanent and self- 
determining process of explication of the Absolute 
One, setting out from and returning into itself. Duly 
to contrast it with this sublime idea of evolution, the 
progress that pluralism implies requires a distinctive 
name. It will be better at least at the outset to call 
the latter a process of integration and equilibration — 
terms which, it will be remembered, hold a prominent 
place in the synthetic philosophy of Herbert Spencer. 
Which is the truer view it is impossible, of course, to 
decide while the issue between pluralism and absolutism 
is still itself undecided. Whether the whole is prior to 
the parts or not, depends on the nature of the case. 
If the whole be a wood, then to the charge that he 
cannot see the wood for the trees, the pluralist may 
retort that at any rate the trees make the wood, not 
the wood the trees. But if the whole be a tree, it may 
be true that he fails to see the trunk because of the 
branches, and yet it is from the trunk that all these 
spring. Anyhow it is the parts, the many, with which 
the pluralist starts ; the question, whether or no there 
is an absolute whole prior to — at once the. logical and 
the real ground of — all the parts, is for him not the 
first question but the last. What we have now to do 
then is to consider this progressive integration that the 
Many imply, and in particular to ascertain the possible 
limits of the process 1 . 

The whole is more than the sum of its parts — that 

is the cardinal characteristic of evolution as understood 

by the pluralist. A unity that is not more than its 

constituent elements is no real unity at all : it is only 

1 Cf. Lecture ix. 



1 02 Evolution as Epigenesis and Equilibration 

a formal or mathematical whole. All real synthesis 
entails new properties which its component factors in 
their previous isolation did not possess. This statement 
many will hesitate to accept ; for a methodological 
distinction — that is, or was, commonly regarded as 
answering to a real difference in things — will, no doubt, 
occur to them : the distinction, I mean, between those 
concurring causes whose separate effects are said merely 
"to be compounded with one another," as in mechanical 
actions, and those, such as in chemical actions, " where 
the separate effects cease entirely and are succeeded 
by phenomena altogether different," by new and so- 
called ' heteropathic ' effects. This distinction — which 
the pluralist principle seems plainly to ignore, or rather, 
tacitly to contradict — is, according to J. S. Mill, whose 
account of it I have just quoted, " one of the funda- 
mental distinctions in nature." Not merely so, but the 
former case, that of the 'composition of causes,' as 
Mill terms it, is, he holds, the general one ; " the 
other" — perhaps the only one, certainly the chief ac- 
cording to pluralism — he declares " is always special 
and exceptional 1 ." So it will seem so long, but only 
so long, as we overlook the essentially abstract character 
of the mechanical doctrine of the 'composition of forces.' 
If the causes compounded are purely quantitative, of 
course there can be no qualitative ' intermixture of 
effects.' But let all that actually happens in the real 
cases abstractly exemplifying such quantitative homo- 
geneity be taken into account and no one, I imagine, 
will deny that heterogeneity is also present. The 
motions that the astronomer describes, for example, 
1 System of Logic, bk in. ch. vi. § 2. 



Compound and Heteropathic Effects 103 

are far from being the only effects that the constitution 
of the solar system involves. Even if the various 
physical phenomena it displays should also eventually 
admit of mechanical description, such description would 
still remain abstract and general : it could never ear- 
mark the individuals concerned and follow their several 
histories. 

Meanwhile it still remains an open question, as 
Mach has said 1 , whether the mechanical view of 
things instead of being the profoundest is not the 
shallowest of all. One thing at any rate is certain, 
a strictly mechanical theory of the world, since it 
necessarily implies complete reversibility, can never 
explain what we understand by progress and develop- 
ment. Mechanism can always, life and experience can 
never, be made to move backwards : for the one 
composition and resolution are altogether on a par, 
in that they entail no change of either mass or energy; 
for the other there is the vital difference of value 
between organization and disorganization, sense and 
nonsense. The so-called conservation of mass and 
energy might be regarded as symbolising the initial 
state of the pluralistic world and as symbolising too 
the mere permanence and abstract being of its many 
units. But it is notorious that these concepts are the 
result of ignoring those differences of quality which 
alone convert units into individuals. Without these 
we may have Erhaltung but not Entfalhtng, as a 
German would say : we may have conservation and 

1 Cf. his excellent chapter on 'The relation of mechanics to 
the other sciences ' : Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwickelung, ch. v. 
Of this work there is an American translation. 



1 04 Evolution as Epigenesis and Equilibration 

indefinite composition but not development and definite 
organization. In short, the concrete integration of 
experience is the diametrical opposite to the mechanical 
resultant of a composition of abstract units : it is a 
creative resultant or synthesis, to use Wundt's happy 
and striking phrase 1 . Evolution, then, for the pluralist 
is always synthesis, and all real synthesis is creative 
synthesis. 

Of such synthesis experience furnishes instances at 
every turn. The timbre of a musical note is more 
than the sum of its constituent tones : a melody more 
than the sum of its separate notes. To an infant or a 
dog a picture may afford all the colour sensations that 
it does to us, but for lack of intellectual synthesis the 
picture is not a significant whole. We are ourselves 
only at this level when we first catch sight of an un- 
expected object which we momentarily fail to recognise, 
or when owing to lapse of attention we cease to ' take 
in the sense ' or ' lose the thread ' of what we hear or 
read. Again, to repeat an instance I have used else- 
where : — " A fish can feel, smell, taste, see, and even 
hear, but we cannot assume solely on that account that 
it has any percepts to which its five senses contribute, 
as they do to our percept, say, of an orange or a 
peppermint. Taking voluntary movements as the 
index of psychical life, it would seem that the fish's 
movements are instigated and guided by its senses not 

1 But to Lotze belongs the credit of first signalising the fact to 
which Wundt has given the name ; and even Lotze gets so far as to 
apply the term creation to this 'relating activity,' as he calls it. 
Cf. his Metaphysik, §§ 268, 271. It is, to say the least, surprising 
that Wundt nowhere refers to Lotze's unquestionable priority in this 
matter. 



'Creative Synthesis'' 105 

collectively but separately... To this inability to combine 
simple percepts into one complex of a single object or 
situation we may reasonably attribute the fish's lack 
of sagacity 1 ." It is just this difference between appre- 
hending the parts and comprehending the whole that 
distinguishes what we call intellect from mere sense. 
It was the failure to appreciate this difference that 
made the sensationalist doctrine prima facie plausible — 
Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit prius in sensu ; 
as it was the failure to find the intellectually new 
among the sensationally old, that eventually proved 
this doctrine to be unsound. Spatial and temporal 
perception are conspicuous examples of creative syn- 
thesis, the genesis of which sensationalists have failed 
to explain and ' nativists ' to explain away. By this 
process at every stage 'objects of a higher order,' as 
they have been happily termed, are attained; and these 
in turn may serve as the constituents of a new synthesis. 
So advancing, experience continually gains at once in 
complexity and in unity. 

The prime source of this synthesis the pluralist 
leaves where Kant eventually left it 2 — in the activity 
of the experiencing subjects ; though it must be allowed 
that the pluralist extends the concepts of experience 
and activity far beyond the range of Kant's so-called 
' synthetic unity of apperception.' The peculiarity of 
each individual's syntheses again is regarded as due 
primarily to what we call the individual's interest, 

1 Ency. Brit, nth edn, art. 'Psychology,' p. 572. 

2 I say eventually, because in his Dissertation of 1770 Kant was 
nearer to the Absolutist position. Cf. Caird, The Critical Philosophy 
of Kant, 1. pp. 209 ff. 



106 Evolution as Epigenesis and Equilibration 

giving to this term also a more extended meaning 
than it commonly receives. In other and plainer 
words perhaps, there is progressive experience at all 
because there are active individuals, severally sui 
generis, each from its own standpoint bent on working 
out a modus vivendi with the rest. And here we may 
remark the one-sidedness of the current concept of 
biological evolution as consisting simply in adaptation 
to environment, or even in adaptation by environment. 
For pluralism the adaptation is not rigidly one-sided 
but more or less reciprocal, a mutuum commercium, to 
use Kant's phrase. The more experience advances, 
the more there is of adaptation of environment as well 
as of adaptation to environment. 

The synthesis by which experience is extended 
and enriched is then, we have to remember, not merely 
nor primarily knowledge. We begin by trying and 
end by knowing. Practice is the parent of theory and 
realisation the surest verification. We may be repelled 
by the idealist's paradox of the identity of thought and 
being, yet we insist that what we immediately experi- 
ence is reality. If so, the reality, whatever it be 
besides, is this interaction of cognitive and conative 
agents : reality is experience. It is in this light that 
the pluralist seeks to interpret the fact of organization. 
Whereas naturalism, as we have seen, regards experience 
as the result of organization, pluralism regards organi- 
zation as the result of experience : in other words, for 
the one the question seems to be how the body comes by 
its soul ; for the other, it is rather how the soul comes 
by its body. But in truth we know nothing of dis- 
embodied souls or of inanimate organisms : experience 



Structure determined by Function 107 

and organization appear always to advance together ; 
it will be more exact therefore to say that the naturalist 
makes function depend entirely on structure while the 
pluralist holds structure to be mainly determined by 
function. The opposition is not complete, for, as we 
have seen, a combination may present itself, which, 
from the point of view of the individual who turns it 
to account, is wholly fortuitous. Still even then it is 
entirely his action in selecting and utilising it that 
determines its function, and often leads to its further 
modification. — The multiplicity of parts of which a 
structure is composed is only a whole or organized 
when regarded in the light of the specific function 
which it subserves. This function is the new fact that 
is more than the sum of their properties, the creative 
synthesis that makes the parts an individual unity. 
The determination of structure by function is beyond 
question in the human affairs from which in the first 
instance all these teleological concepts of structure, 
function, organ, end and the like are derived ; and it 
is, of course, on this analogy that the pluralisms inter- 
pretation exclusively rests. Let us then consider the 
characteristics of what we loosely call evolution in this 
practical realm. 

First then, to repeat, it is, proximately at all events, 
a process of synthesis or epigenesis, not one of strict 
evolution or preformation. It is needless now to dwell 
on this point. That the various forms of social organi- 
zation, political, industrial, academical or artistic, imply 
the cooperation and consensus of their several members 
is obvious. But there is another point worth notice in 
passing. We have called this synthesis creative ; 



1 08 Evolution as Epigenesis and Equilibration 

whereas the idea of potentiality, that is rarely long 
out of sight when development is in question, still 
suggests that the new was in some sort present, was 
in some sort, therefore, already preformed in the old — 
potentially there from the first. We owe this notion 
entirely to retrospective reflexion. Having seen one 
acorn in a suitable environment become an oak, we 
say of a second that it is potentially or virtually an 
oak already. Not only is such language, strictly 
speaking, indefensible 1 , it is also worthless in so far 
as it throws no light on the process which it indicates, 
but does not even describe. Reality is entirely actuality : 
the potential, the possible, the problematic, on the 
other hand, belong exclusively to abstract thought. 
But that, while it always presupposes, is never com- 
mensurate with, reality. Actuality again is entirely 
experience : its factors are never abstract possibilities, 
they are living agents ; and the result of their inter- 
action is a perennial epigenesis, the only creation that 
pluralism recognises. Ex nihilo nihil fit applies only 
to what begins to exist. In this sense creation out of 
nothing, thing supervening on no thing, is a contra- 
diction, so surely as position, affirmation is necessarily 
prior to deposition, negation. But e minimo maximum 
fit is the truth which the notion of potentiality en- 
deavours to express by inverting the process in idea 
after it has been realised in fact, realised directly by 
the creative synthesis for which pluralism contends. 

1 " The more a writer feels himself led naturally to have recourse 
to this phrase," says Mr Bradley, " the better cause he probably has 
for at least attempting to avoid it." Cf. his excellent remarks on the 
whole subject, Appearance and Reality, pp. 384-7. 



Synthesis creates new values 109 

In the next place, then, it will be granted that 
what synthesis creates in the practical world is not 
new entities but what we may call new values. As 
already said, whatever be the ultimate meaning to be 
assigned to mass and energy, we may allow the bare 
conservation of this : in respect of it the new would be 
only formative: there would be no new content. Even 
the manifold products of human art and industry, steam- 
engines and dynamos, looms and printing-presses, 
drugs and explosives, regarded in themselves, are but 
re-arrangements of so-called forces and elements. It 
is far otherwise when the human ends for which alone 
they were devised are taken into account. But most 
of all when we consider human achievements in litera- 
ture, science and art, the entire uplift of humanity 
from its rudest beginning to its present state of 
civilisation, the social, ethical and religious ideals that 
it has come to cherish and pursue, we need not hesitate 
to call all this inestimable store of new worth a veritable 
creation. Though there is no increase of energy there 
is an increase of directed energy : though there is no 
increase of mass there is an increase of determinate 
structure as the ' will to a higher unity ' is realised. 
The good that is achieved tends not only to be con- 
served but to grow and advance to worthier forms and 
that without assignable limits. 

But in a social organization there is no absolute 
opposition between structure and function. As in all 
organization, function is a unity depending on a com- 
plexity of structure. But in the structure the proximate 
parts are again complex, each having however a single 
function ; and so again of their parts in descending 



1 10 Evolution as Epigenesis and Equilibration 

order. This characteristic the modern pluralist, as we 
have seen, following the lead of Leibniz, is prepared 
to extend indefinitely. What we have now to notice 
are certain consequences which this relation involves, 
consequences which our social and individual experi- 
ences plainly verify. The function of a general in the 
field, for example, is the direction of the campaign as 
a whole : the execution of his orders in detail he leaves 
to the several members of his staff in such wise, that 
they in turn have to issue further more specific orders 
to their various adjutants ; and so on again and again, 
till at length thousands of private soldiers are set in 
motion. But even the movements that these perform 
are carried out by a so-called ' psycho-physical mecha- 
nism,' to which the detailed co-ordination is left : of 
this they individually know nothing. And throughout, 
it is this gradual mechanization of lower functions by 
habit, that makes it possible to concentrate attention on 
higher functions. We have ample experience of this 
relief in our acquired dexterities, and it is assumed that 
the same principle holds good indefinitely. — Similarly 
if we order shoes we do not need to know how to make 
them, and the shoemaker in ordering leather has not 
to tell the currier how to tan it; but in earlier times we 
may suppose that everyone prepared his hides and 
made shoes for himself, doing both badly. In such a 
hierarchy of consentient functions as we are considering, 
each unit is — to use the Aristotelian phraseology — 
' form ' for the function below it and ' matter ' for the 
function above it. Every form too is conditioned by 
its appropriate matter : soldiers cannot be effectively 
manoeuvred till they have mastered their drill, nor 



Interdependence of Higher and Lower 1 1 1 

good shoes be made without good leather. Thus in 
all organization there is not only continuity through- 
out ; there is also what the sociologist calls solidarity 
as well : the higher depends on the lower. And 
this relation according to pluralism will hold good 
however far the synthesis may go, however sublime 
the worth that may be attained. What we shall reach 
will never be a single unity independent of the plurality 
beneath, but only the harmonious coordination and 
consentience of these — ideally, an absolute harmony: 
in this sense at any rate the Many become more and 
more one. 

But this dependence of the higher on the lower is 
only half the truth. As our individual and social 
experiences show us, the lower can also depend upon 
the higher, and this to an ever-increasing extent as we 
ascend in the scale of being. As we have already 
seen, there is according to pluralism no absolutely fixed 
environment : modification of environment is possible 
as well as modification by it. And this holds not only of 
the natural environment but — and still more — of the 
social environment as well. But for this power of 
directing it, the progress of development would be, to 
say the least, immeasurably slower than it is. In re- 
spect of this power man is manifestly superior to all 
creatures beneath him ; and among men the civilised 
man and his community to the savage and his tribe. 
The drainage or irrigation of the land, the extirpation 
of tares and the cultivation of wheat, the domestication 
of useful animals and the destruction of their enemies — 
all these processes are strictly in line with the working 
of natural forces or natural selection, but they imply 



1 1 2 Evolution as Epigenesis and Equilibration 

a definite direction that does not appear in these. — 
What the schoolmaster, the physician and the philan- 
thropist effect for the amelioration of the masses needs 
no description. Here again we have definite direction 
overriding the random and untrained impulses of the 
natural man. While the progress already made in the 
physical and social amelioration of human life is in- 
estimable, it is as nothing compared with what is still 
possible. Nine-tenths of our physical ills are due to 
ignorance and perhaps a still greater proportion of our 
social evils are due to selfishness. Present scientific 
knowledge is adequate to remedy a very large part of 
the former and the ordinary prudential maxims of 
utilitarian morality, if they were only observed as they 
might be, would go far towards extinguishing the 
latter : they would put at end to the worships of 
Venus, Bacchus, and Mammon, if even they did not 
establish peace and chain up the dogs of war for ever. 
Social reformers and men of action, who seem to be 
invariably optimists, have often drawn glowing pictures 
of what this world might be if only all the knowledge 
and the wisdom that it contains could be effectively 
put into practice. Before this can be they must be 
shared by all, of course ; but on the other hand it is a 
sublime though obvious truth, that these highest goods 
are not diminished by being diffused. 

Such millennial dreams are of very ancient date. 
The Jewish prophet finely symbolizes his Messianic 
vision as a time when " the wolf shall dwell with the 
lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid... and 
a little child shall lead them... they shall not hurt nor 
destroy ;...for the earth shall be full of the knowledge 






Tendency to Progression 113 

of the Lord as the waters cover the sea." And the 
Christian apostle talks of the whole creation groaning 
and travailing in pain with us in earnest expectation 
that it also shall be delivered from the bondage of 
corruption. Fourier, one of the most celebrated socialist 
writers, believed that an attraction or sympathy, ana- 
logous to Newton's principle of gravitation between 
material bodies, existed throughout the universe and 
tended to bring about a complete harmony between 
society, animal life, organic life and so-called dead 
matter. His speculations and his prophecies as to the 
changes that were to ensue in the physical world as 
the socialistic reorganization of society approached per- 
fection were doubtless fanciful in the extreme. Herbert 
Spencer's attempt to connect absolute ethics and cosmic 
equilibration, though seemingly more reasonable, is in 
fact more absurd. For, in making the physical aspect 
of things the only fundamental and complete one, he is 
logically driven to ignore the direction of the lower by 
the higher altogether. The universe for him is like a 
vast egg which hatches out perfectly by what he was 
once pleased to call a ' beneficent necessity.' 

But if the extravagant fancy of many ultra-utopian 
visions of a final harmony among things ' seen and 
temporal ' is reprehensible, not less so is the dearth of 
imagination that can picture nothing new under the 
sun. It is doubtless a mistake to attempt to forecast 
the further course of evolution in detail : so far as 
synthesis is creative this must be impossible save 
within comparatively narrow limits. But it is equally 
a mistake to ignore the tendency to progression, which 
we find not only to exist in fact, but also to follow as 

w. 8 



1 14 Evolution as Epigenesis and Equilibration 

an a priori consequence from the fundamental character 
of the world as pluralism conceives it. As the world 
of the mere physicist tends towards a state of final 
equilibrium, so the world of the personal idealist tends 
towards a final harmony or equilibration. The Kantian 
'principle of community' is applicable to both cases: — 
" All substances, in so far as they are coexistent, stand 
in complete community, that is, reciprocity one to 
another 1 ." The nature of the communio or mutuum 
commercium, as Kant called it, is, proximately at any 
rate, very different in the two cases. In a dynamical 
system, whatever be its initial configuration, there will 
be continual changes of configuration all tending towards 
the eventual equilibration of the whole. In a 'personal' 
system of sentient and conative agents the situation is 
more complex, even though we do not aim at more than 
a bare and abstract statement. Here the end of every 
action is the good : quidquid petitur petitur sub specie 
boni. But the good of each member is dependent on 
its relation to others, and at the outset involves, as we 
have seen, more or less blind and aimless struggle : 
this is the initial state of such a system on the pluralist 
view. For all members with like interests, however, 
there will be a common good and a common evil : so 
far their actions will tend as completely as possible to 
realise the one and to eliminate the other. If this 
were all, the case would be simple enough : the parallel 
between a dynamical system and a personal system 
would be very close. But the nature of individuality 
forbids that the immediate interests of any two indi- 

1 Critique of the Pure Reason, 1st edn. The Third Analogy of 
Experience. 



Final Harmony 115 

viduals should ever be entirely identical. Still even 
where individual interests collide a common interest in 
their adjustment might be expected to arise, and did in 
fact arise as soon as the social level was reached, and 
it has grown with the progress of society and largely 
contributed to that progress. Such adjustment is what 
we call justice, 'the noblest among the virtues' as 
Aristotle has said. 

At the lower level of merely animal life, where 
conscious cooperation is absent, justice is out of the 
question. But even here some equilibration is secured 
by subjective selection, whereby the general environ- 
ment is, so to say, parcelled out and specialised : so 
far in the apt words of Pope, 

All nature's difference keeps all nature's peace. 

Within the same species there must however still be 
competition so long as its numbers increase beyond 
the resources of its peculiar habitat. Here we come 
upon the Malthusian principle and its consequence, 
natural selection. But again so soon as reason can be 
brought to bear, an enlightened sense of justice can 
operate to adjust population to the means of subsistence 
and to secure the ends blindly attained through natural 
selection by peaceful and painless means : the arts of 
eugenics and hygienics may render the struggle for 
existence unnecessary. Not so in the merely animal 
world : here natural selection seems unavoidable. But 
after all natural selection secures progress — of this 
palaeontology affords ample evidence — and even equi- 
libration in a certain wider sense, i.e. between species 
and species. In concluding the Origin of Species 
Darwin went so far as to say : " As natural selection 

8—2 



1 1 6 Evolution as Epigenesis and Equilibration 

works solely by and for the good of each being, all 
corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress 
towards perfection." Even if we allow this claim there 
still remains the fact that all the lower forms of life 
prey one upon another; and mankind takes its full share 
of such spoils. In this respect there seems no elim- 
inating struggle for existence. We have thus on the 
whole two principles at work — the ethical at the human 
level, where justice may be supreme; and the principle 
that might is right, practically the Heldenmoral of 
Nietzsche. We may call these respectively Rational 
Selection and Natural Selection. 

But there is a vast difference between the individuals 
concerned in the two cases: a human being is a person, 
an animal is at best a chattel, in legal phrase. In 
looking at the world historically as pluralism does, we 
regard only species of plants and animals but we take 
account of individual men 1 . If we are content to stop 
at this division into natural and rational we can main- 
tain a universal tendency towards progress and harmony 
or equilibration to be characteristic of the world as the 
pluralist conceives and regards it. 

1 It is interesting to note here the fundamental division of Ethics 
which Kant makes, grounded on the relation between the obliger and 
the obliged; according to this jural relations are denied between men 
and animals because these are " irrational beings devoid of power to 
oblige and towards whom no obligation can be constituted." Meta- 
physik der Sitten, Hartenstein's edn, vn. p. 38. 



LECTURE VI. 

THE PLURALISTIC GOAL. 

We have now to face the question what sort of 
unity would be attained if the ideal were fully realised 
which the pluralistic interpretation of experience directly 
suggests. Such an inquiry brings us first of all to the 
problem, so much discussed of late by sociologists, as 
to the nature of society. Is society an organism? it is 
asked. That there are many analogies between society 
and an organism is certain, and impressive instances of 
their employment will at once occur to everyone, the 
fable of Menenius Agrippa, the parable of the vine, 
and St Paul's exhortation to the Corinthians, for 
example. But it is obvious too that if an organism must 
be literally either an animal or a vegetable, then, since 
society is certainly neither of these, it is not an organism : 
it lacks the physical continuity that they possess 1 . On 
the other hand, the more we lay stress on the co- 
operation of the several individual members and the 
adjustment of their respective functions, the more 
justification we shall find for the conception of what 
we may call sociological, as distinct from biological, 
organisms — organisms, that is to say, which imply a 
further and higher evolutional synthesis. In fact, if 

1 Nevertheless it has a continuity of a higher order, the con- 
tinuity due to the mutual understanding and cooperation of its 
constituents. Cf. Fouillee, Les Elements sociologiques de la Morale, 
1905, p. 148. 



n8 The Pluralistic Goal 

with Kant and Hegel we define the living organism as 
a unity in which the whole and the parts are reciprocally 
ends to each other, such a definition seems even more 
applicable to society than it is to the biological indi- 
vidual, since the constituent members of the latter are 
not conscious, at least not self-conscious, and, moreover, 
are not coordinate. This brings us to the heart of the 
problem that divides sociologists so hopelessly. It is 
true that the individual man, for example, thinks and 
wills, and that his several organs — as ordinarily regarded 
— do not ; but, per contra, is it not true that while the 
several members of a commonwealth think and will 
the society as a whole does not ? When Plato and 
Hobbes compare the state to a vast person and the 
individual man to a miniature state do they not over- 
look this essential difference ? Is society then really 
a unity ; or is there in any exact sense a social spirit, 
a social will, a social end, a social conscience ? 

Two radically different answers have been given to 
such questions by the so-called realistic and nominal- 
istic sociologists respectively. We are familiar enough 
with the latter in England : their standpoint is the 
thoroughly individualistic one characteristic of 18th cen- 
tury speculation in general and of English psychology, 
ethics, and economics in particular. According to the 
nominalistic view, a society is a collection of individuals 
held together by the private interests that association 
promotes and which the social contract was deliberately 
formed to secure. Between a collection of n indepen- 
dent persons, having each his own ends and aims, and 
the same number formed into a society with ends and 
aims in common, the only difference — great though it be 
in its consequences — is, it may be said, essentially an 



Is Society really a Unity? 119 

accidental or extraneous one : it is solely the result of 
a coincidence of interests. Some animals, like rooks 
or deer, find it advantageous to congregate together ; 
others, like hawks and tigers, to live apart. Man 
belongs to the sociable animals, and, owing to his 
superior intelligence, human society is more elaborate 
than any found among the lower animals. But in a 
human society of n units there is as little ground for 
regarding the society as an n + ith unity with a distinct 
— and also superior — consciousness and will, as there 
would be in the humbler but otherwise parallel case of 
a colony of ants. 

The other extreme, the ' realistic ' concept of 
society, is well represented in Hegel's famous doc- 
trine of 'Objective Spirit.' Whereas for the nomi- 
nalistic extreme, society was the accident and the 
isolated individuals the substance, here the relation 
is completely transposed. It is this spirit, Hegel 
expressly says, that " has reality, and the individuals 
are but its accidents." If we " proceed atomistically, 
ascending from the isolated individuals \Einzelnheit\ 
as basis " we shall never, he allows, attain to spirit as 
objective reality at all, but only to a combination or 
Zusammenhang. That amounts to saying : the nomi- 
nalistic view is right in its conclusion but its premisses 
are false. " For [objective] spirit," Hegel continues, 
" is not an individual thing : rather it is the unity of 
the individual and the general 1 ." As this is sometimes 
expressed nowadays : Society is a reality but an over- 
individual reality. Instead of calling the nominalistic 
premisses false, it would be more exact to say that they 
are ambiguous : the so-called individual is one being 
1 Philosophie des Rechtes, § 156. 



120 The Pluralistic Goat 

out of society and quite another being in it. A hand 
severed from the living body is a hand no more, 
Aristotle long ago remarked ; and no combination or 
Zusammenhang of disjecta membra will ever make a 
living whole. This is the truth that the whole 18th 
century failed to grasp, and that the 19th has taught 
us to appreciate fully. The individuals whom Hobbes, 
Locke, Rousseau and others imagined deliberately 
contracting to form society were conceived as already 
intelligent, and reasoning, i.e. as already social products. 
— To ask which was first, a polity or man as 'a political 
animal,' is no better than to ask the trivial question, 
which was first, the hen or the Ggg. If by man you 
mean man as self-conscious and rational, then take him 
where or when you will he is what he is only because 
society preceded him. Had your specimens chanced 
to have lived the life of the legendary wild men of the 
woods, they could neither have devised nor accepted 
a social scheme at all. Biologically regarded these 
two kinds of men would be identical, psychologically 
the difference between them would be profound. The 
first, the so-called * natural man,' is not a man in the 
second sense, is not a self-conscious, ethical person, at 
all. To suppose a group of the former should straight- 
way constitute an organic unity of the latter is as ab- 
surd as to say that a handful of type is a set of verses. 
And yet somehow or other the transition has been 
effected, it will be said. It has ; but the process 
according to the pluralisms theory was an instance — 
and the most important one — of that creative synthesis 
which I have already attempted to describe. As the 
outcome of such a synthesis both the state and its several 
self-conscious members are a new creation. Neither the 



' Objective Mind ' and rational Persons 1 2 1 

one nor the other can be found in the primitive horde 
instinctively drawn together by mutual interests. Pari 
passu the two are evolved together: as the mere crowd of 
troglodytes become organized into a society they become 
differentiated as free persons ; and again, in proportion 
as their rights and duties become more clearly defined 
they in turn attain to a clearer consciousness of them- 
selves as rational and responsible individuals. But still 
the question presses : Granted that in becoming social 
the individual man becomes self-conscious and rational, 
still what exactly is meant when society is called a 
spiritual organism ? What at any rate is not meant is 
an n-h ith individual somehow superinduced upon the 
n individuals constituting its several members, any 
more than by an organism is meant an n+ ith organ 
additional to its complement of n organs. The objective 
mind, to use Hegel's phrase, is not something tran- 
scendent, existing aloof and apart: it is, on the contrary, 
the informing spirit immanent in the whole, whereby 
the several parts rise upwards towards a higher, common 
life : in this sense it is as he terms it ' the unity of the 
individual and the general.' To many such language 
may not seem to mean much or to be very illuminating. 
But we may perhaps find a helpful illustration by re- 
calling the development of the Metazoa or multicellular 
animals from so-called Toose colonies' or aggregates 
of Protozoa or unicellular animals, already referred to 
in an earlier lecture 1 — though the parallel is not exact, 
since society is not a biological organism. The several 
cells of a complex organism still retain their identity 
and continue their individual lives ; but if this were all 
they would remain a mere aggregate ; nor would they 
1 Cf. Lecture in. p. 58. 



122 The Pluralistic Goal 

be more, if they differentiated independently. When 
however they differentiate, as it were in touch with 
each other, they become mutually complementary. In 
and with such consentient action there emerges that 
higher common life, which constitutes them into organs 
and the whole into an organism. As the unicellular 
organisms of the protozoan cluster become organs,, 
the cluster becomes a new organism, a metazoan ; and 
vice versa as the cluster becomes an organism, the 
primitive unicellular organisms become organs. In 
other words the more intimate the unity of the whole 
the more complete the differentiation of its members. 
The two in short are strictly correlative, reciprocally 
cause and effect, means and end to each other. We 
should accordingly regard it as simply absurd to grant 
that the cells had become organs while hesitating to 
recognise that ipso facto the cluster had become an 
organism. If it does not seem equally absurd to allow 
that the individual man as a social unit is a rational 
and moral being — and stop there, that is only because 
familiarity has blinded us to what such an admission 
implies. Let us then pass on to its explication. 

What now do reason and morality imply ? It will 
suffice to go at once to what is for us the main point : 
they imply what since Kant it has been usual to call 
' objectivity.' The sensory and appetitive experiences 
of a given individual are altogether immediate, be- 
ginning and ending with himself, not merely exclusively 
and inalienably his, but also in their particularity 
peculiar to him and different from the immediate 
experiences of all others beside. Such are the charac- 
teristics of experience logically included together as 
subjectivity. Experience as objective is the precise 



' Objectivity ' 1 23 

opposite of this : it is never immediate, determined 
that is by sense or appetite ; nor is it either confined to 
the individual or contingent to him : on the contrary it 
is or it may become an unreservedly common possession 
by virtue of just those factors which we call reason and 
morality ; for these are alike for all and binding on the 
thought and action of each. In experience as sub- 
jective we find only the particular and contingent : in 
experience as objective we find always the universal 
and necessary. To subjective experience as such 
Leibniz's description will apply; it mirrors the universe 
from a particular and unique standpoint ; to objective 
experience as such on the other hand that description 
is not applicable, x 

Objectivity cannot then be a characteristic of a 
purely individual experience, and to say that it is 
universal or common to all cannot mean that — like the 
blackness of crows, to use a trivial illustration — it is 
singly and separately developed in each. To God, it 
is true, Leibniz applied the old saying "that as a centre 
He is everywhere, but His circumference is nowhere 1 .'' 
Such language may be taken to imply an experience 
that is at once completely subjective and completely 
objective, at once altogether individual and altogether 
absolute. But such an experience entirely transcends 
our conception. — With this we may couple a well-known 
quotation from Aristotle's Politics ; " He who has no 
need of society because he is sufficient for himself, 
must either be a brute or a god." No wonder the 
transition from brute to man, from sense and appetite 
to reason and law, seemed inconceivable apart from 
special divine interference, so long as it was regarded 
1 Principles of Nature and Grace, § 13. 



124 The Pluralistic Goal 

as taking place in each individual singulatim, as prior 
to the dawn of evolutionary ideas it invariably was. 
Still this long failure of individualism scientifically to 
bridge the gulf between man and brute is strong tes- 
timony to the living unity of the social organism. 
Through this objective mind, then, pervading all its 
members, and not through any infusion from without, 
each one in being social becomes human. It is true 
that society is wholly constituted by its members, and 
is nothing apart from them, but it is equally true that 
in forming it they pro tanto transfigure and at the 
same time transcend their isolated selves. By inter- 
subjective intercourse they attain to the transsub- 
jective or truly objective, both in knowledge and in 
action ; and the more clearly they differentiate them- 
selves from others the more distinct their own self- 
conscious personality becomes. 

This reference to self-consciousness brings us to a 
new point well deserving of a moment's consideration. 
It was Kant's great merit to have signalised the mutual 
implication of self-consciousness and objectivity in the 
higher or epistemological sense just defined. " That all 
the various elements of our empirical consciousness must 
be bound together in one self-consciousness is," he says, 
" the absolutely first foundation of our thinking at all 1 ." 
Such is the import of what he has made known as the 
* synthetic unity of apperception.' But in his exposition 
of this principle in what he entitled the ' deduction (i.e. 
justification) of the categories' Kant alternates between 
two distinct inquiries, to the mutual confusion of both. 
The one he calls the subjective deduction, the other 

1 Critique of the Pure Reason, ist edn, Max Miiller's trans, 
p. 103 note. 



Kanfs 'Subjective Deduction' 125 

the objective. The first is largely a psychological in- 
quiry : it shows all the worst faults of the old psycho- 
logy of ready-made faculties, and it is oblivious of all 
questions of development. That it was defective, 
Kant was from the first more or less dimly aware, 
and he was driven by adverse criticisms in the end 
practically to abandon it 1 . What he did not see 
was that, from the nature of the case, his so-called 
subjective deduction could not be conclusive. The 
question really was, How does objective experience 
arise ? and Kant in the first edition of his Critique set 
himself to answer this question — very much as Locke 
might have done — that is to say, by observing the 
process in the working of his own mind as it was when 
the genesis of all the functions or faculties concerned 
was already complete. Or what comes ultimately to 
the same thing, he adopted the analysis of ' the in- 
tellectual powers ' provided ready to his hand in the 
psychology then current, an analysis reached in the 
usual individualistic fashion, and vitiated by the 
psychologist's fallacy of attributing to the growing 
mind the powers that only gradually emerge as its 
development proceeds. It was as if an anatomist 
should say that the eyes and hands were already 
preformed in the embryo ; and as we have seen 
anatomists did actually say this. In biology however 
the hypothesis of literal evolution at length gave way to 
the hypothesis of epigenesis and only lingered on in 
psychology, where its fallaciousness was less palpable. 
But in the Prolegomena, written five years later to 

1 Cf. Kant's preface to the ist edn of the Critique, pp. xxvi f., 
and his preface to the Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Natur- 
wissenschaften, Hartenstein's edn, Vol. iv. pp. 363 ff. 



126 The Pluralistic Goal 

obviate difficulties and meet criticisms, Kant made an 
important distinction between what he called judgments 
of experience, which have objective validity, and mere 
judgments of perception, which are only subjectively 
valid. He then proceeds to add: — "All our judgments 
are at first mere perception -judgments: they hold good 
simply for us, i.e. for our subjectivity. It is only 
subsequently that we give them a new reference, namely 
to an object, and intend (wollen) that they shall hold 
good for us not only at the moment but at all other 
times, and in like manner for all other persons." Again 
a couple of pages later he states this difference between 
the two acts of judgment as follows : — In the one 
" I merely compare the percepts and combine them in 
one consciousness of my own state," in the other I 
compare and combine them in one consciousness in 
general (einem Beivusstsein iiberkaupt) 1 . 

Within these statements there is room for all that 
we have to contend for. The so-called judgments of 
perception are the nearest approach to a true, explicit, 
judgment possible to the individual apart from inter- 
subjective intercourse. The observation of the lower 
animals and of children furnishes ample evidence of this, 
and nowadays it is, I believe, questioned by nobody 2 . 
Between the stage of these perceptive judgments 
and that at which judgments-proper arise — judgments, 

1 Prolegomena §§ 18, 20. 

2 Kant himself in another connexion had noted this fact some 
twenty years before he gave his Critique to the world ; though even 
then he seemed to attribute the difference between man and the 
lower animals to reason as a 'heaven-sent faculty' — to use a phrase 
of Mr Bradley's — rather than to reason as the result of social develop- 
ment. (Cf. the paper 'On the false subtilty of the syllogistic 
figures,' Werke, Hartenstein's edn, 11. pp. 67 f.) 



Kanfs 'Objective Deduction' 127 

that is to say, having an objective import, and which 
Kant was content to speak of merely as ' subsequent ' 
— there intervenes the whole long process of social 
development. This is implied in their characteristic 
as judgments valid for consciousness generally, valid 
not merely for me and now but for all and always. 
Unless then I am conscious not simply of myself 
but of others who are conscious of themselves and 
of me, I cannot so much as understand what ob- 
jective validity means, to say nothing of affirming that 
it exists. 

We come then to Kant's main position, the objective 
deduction, viz. that apperception — or that consciousness 
of objects which goes with self-consciousness — as 
opposed to perception, is the pre-condition of all 
intelligent and scientific experience. What we are 
here concerned about is not to call the principle in 
question but simply to indicate and emphasize the one 
point that Kant completely overlooked. It is a fact, 
at any rate, that 'the absolutely first foundation of such 
objective experience ' is to be found only in society, in 
intersubjective intercourse, and not in 'apperception as 
a faculty' pertaining to the isolated individual mind 1 . 
But though Kant, and I may add, most of his com- 
mentators and critics, overlook this fact, they do not 
mean to deny it. Not only is it implied, as I have 
just said, in the necessity and universality which Kant 
assigns as the marks of judgments proper, or judgments 
of experience ; but it is more or less explicitly re- 
cognised in his various formulations of the moral law 
or categorical imperative : " Act only according to that 

1 Cf. the passage already cited, p. 124 above. 



128 The Pluralistic Goal 

maxim which thou canst at the same time will should 
be a universal law," i.e. " Act so as to use humanity, 
whether in your own person or in the person of another, 
always as an end, never as merely a means 1 ." 

It is in this ethical connexion that Kant's most 
distinguished English commentator, E. Caird, in- 
sisted at some length on what he himself called the 
'objective and social character of self-consciousness/ 
I will venture to quote some sentences, because they 
help, I think, to explain the general oversight which 
we have just noticed: — "It may be truly said that we 
find ourselves in others before we find ourselves 
in ourselves, and that the full consciousness of self 
comes only through the consciousness of beings 
without us who are also selves. Self-consciousness in 
one is kindled by self-consciousness in another, and a 
social community of life is presupposed in our first 
consciousness of ourselves as individual persons. It is 
true, indeed, that in his first return upon self, the 
individual is conscious rather of opposition to, than of 
community with, the other selves to whom he finds 
himself in relation.... But we should not be misled by 
the self-seeking and self-will, which are the first mani- 
festations of selfhood, so as to forget that the individual's 
consciousness of himself as an independent self is 
essentially a return upon self from the consciousness of 
others which it implies.... In the first instance the 
subject... does not reflect on the relativity by which 
this independent selfhood is mediated and especially 
on the social unity which it presupposes ; and therefore 

1 Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Ethics ; H.'s edn, Vol. iv. 
pp. 269, 277. 



Self-consciousness through others 129 

he can see no claim which other beings and things 
have upon him to be used otherwise than as means to 
his own ends 1 ." That man's primitive egoism in practical 
life has helped to hide the social implications of self- 
consciousness seems to me a remark that is both new 
and true. 

There is still a further remark of some importance 
that may opportunely be made here. It is often said 
that experience cannot actually "testify to anything 
more than the existence of the subject — the existence of 
a plurality of similar Ego's is an inference, a hypothesis 
to explain the phenomena 2 ." But drawing inferences 
and framing explanatory hypotheses presuppose a self- 
conscious intelligence already possessed of that objective 
experience, which by implying its own universality 
and necessity, implies also a plurality of selves. On 
this assumption then we come to a deadlock or find 
ourselves revolving in a hopeless circle. But the 
escape is simple, once we recognise that experience 
from the outset involves both subject and object, both 
self and other, and that the differentiation of both 
factors proceeds strictly pari passu. 

We conclude then that society is truly a living 
reality, though a complex and over-individual one. 
To it belongs the objective mind that is at once 
immanent in and dominant over its several members, 
who thereby attain to self-consciousness and think and 

1 The Critical Philosophy of Kant, n. pp. 371 f. Another writer 
who has done much to bring out the social character of self- 
consciousness is Prof. Royce : see, for example, his Outlines of 
Psychology, § 115. 

2 So said the late Professor Ritchie, for example, Mind, O. S. 
xiii. p. 258. 

w. 9 



130 The Pluralistic Goal 

act as rational persons. But societies as they actually 
exist to-day are comparable to those less perfectly 
developed Metazoa in which the differentiation and 
unification of functions is still very incomplete and the 
scope of life very restricted in its range. Many of 
these societies seem little more than reduplications of 
similar parts without any supreme and central principle 
or purpose, like certain organisms that are made up of 
a chain of ganglionated segments and have little or no 
brain. Some indeed are so loosely organized as to 
allow of division without much deterioration. Even 
the modern national states, that have attained to the 
highest stage of civilisation so far known, are still in a 
large measure mutually alien and exclusive, whereas 
the society with which philosophy is concerned is 
synonymous with humanity, nay it is even spoken of 
as cosmopolitan. It is happily true already that as 
regards the higher life of man, society is wider than 
any single political state, and its unifying spirit inspires, 
though but partially and imperfectly, the whole civilised 
world. 

How far will this progress extend? To attempt to 
forecast the future development of humanity in detail 
would indeed be idle. The element of contingency, 
which the individuality of its ultimate factors introduces 
into history, alone suffices to restrain the consistent 
pluralist from all prophecies of this sort. But, on the 
other hand, his general Weltanschauung leads him — as 
we have seen — to believe in a universal tendency 
towards perfection as the very principle of life 1 . 

1 Such tendency towards perfection was several times enounced 
by Leibniz. As an instance may be cited the following : "Not only 



The advance towards a Higher Unity 131 

The pluralisms view of the world leads him also to 
regard this progress as consisting in the advance 
towards a 'higher unity.' To set over against this, 
though the problem of evil is still serious enough, there 
is for the pluralist no ' evil one ' — no principle of evil 
in the world ; and also no pure malevolence, no radikale 
Bose, as Kant called it, in the individual. All things 
in the main and in the long run, he holds, work 
together for good. Or, to put it otherwise, there is a 
conservation and a solidarity of the good such as does 
not exist for evil 1 . Magna est Veritas et praevalebit : 
there are truths that wake to perish never, but errors 
never harmonize and tend inherently to refute one 
another. The memory of the just is blessed, but the 
name of the wicked shall rot. 

Obviously if the hindrances to progress were insur- 
mountable, there could have been no progress at all. 
But it might still be that the hindrances increased as 
progress advanced, that sooner or later a sort of ' law 
of diminishing return ' would begin to operate. We 
are told however that even in the economic sphere of 
man's activity the law of diminishing return holds 
only of "the part which Nature plays in produc- 

do immaterial things subsist always, but also their lives, progress 
and changes are regulated so as to attain to a definite goal, or rather 
to approximate towards it more and more, as asymptotes do. And 
though the movements are retrograde sometimes, like paths that 
have bends in them, yet the advance prevails finally and the end is 
reached." Letter to Queen Charlotte, Philosophische Schriften, 
Gerhardt's edn, vi. pp. 507 ff. 

1 That the essence of religion is 'faith in the conservation of 
value' is the main theme in Professor Hoffding's original and 
interesting Philosophy of Religion. 



132 The Pluralistic Goal 

tion," while "the part which man plays conforms to 
the law of increasing return" and this part "tends to 
diminish or even override any increased resistance 
which Nature may offer to raising increased amounts 
of raw produce 1 ." There is then, we may say with 
some confidence, no a priori ground for any analogy 
between spiritual culture and agriculture in respect of 
cumulative hindrances to progress. We have indeed 
only to look closer at the two most serious obstacles to 
social advance to see that they tend to be less formid- 
able, in proportion, the further the advance proceeds. 
I refer, of course, to ignorance and selfishness. It 
may suffice to consider the last and worst — for society 
and selfishness are in their very essence opposed. 
The conflict of self-interest and duty to others has 
long been a commonplace with ethical writers ; and it 
has even been maintained that without extra-social 
sanctions there is no means of bringing that wholly 
imaginary person, the consistent egoist, to work for 
the general good. Yet after all what keeps the selfish 
man most in countenance is the selfishness of others : 
he does to others as they in general do to him, not as 
he would that they should do. But at least he cannot 
will that the egoistic maxim should be a universal law. 
He approves such examples of public spirit and phil- 
anthropy as he may see, though he does not follow 
them ; and he is ready perhaps to support beneficent 
schemes of legislation to promote ends for which he is 
unwilling to make private sacrifices. This fortunate, 
and — we might add — inevitable, inconsistency permits 

1 Prof. A. Marshall, Principles of Economics, vol. 1. 1st edn, 
P- 379- 



No 'solidarity' of Evil 133 

social sanctions to stand out clearly and to become 
more efficient with every advance that better men 
effect. Probitas laudatur et alget, the satirist has said, 
yet in truth even bare commendation and approval do 
their part in quickening virtue into life. In short the 
objective mind or reason, in which the selfish share, 
divides them, as selfish, against themselves both indi- 
vidually and collectively, and leads them in their own 
despite to further its coherent ends : 

icrOXol fJLtv yap ct7rA.w5, 7ravToSa.7r(j3s Se kolkol. 

" This may be called the cunning of reason," said 
Hegel, " that she permits the passions to work for 
herself so that what they produce [for themselves] is 
forfeited and lost 1 ." So again T. H. Green : — " Where 
the selfishness of man has proposed, his better reason 
has disposed. Whatever the means, the result has 
been a gradual removal of obstacles to that recognition 
of a universal fellowship which the action of reason in 
man potentially constitutes 2 ." Such at least is the 
broad teaching of history so far. 

Extreme as the selfishness of many may still be and 
rare as is any whole-hearted enthusiasm for humanity, 
yet the progress already made is amply sufficient to 
show that the direction in which it has moved and is 
still moving points towards the ultimate conciliation of 
self-interest and the common good. This progress 
may seem small, partly because to us the time it has 
taken looks immense, and partly because it still falls 
indefinitely short of the ideal that we entertain. But 

1 Philosophie der Geschichte, 1840, p. 41. 

2 Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, p. 230. 



134 The Pluralistic Goal 

the problems that time involves do not much concern 
us in this connexion. Der Weltgeist hat Zeit genug, 
as Hegel once said, and in contemplating the world 
historically we have to accustom ourselves to regard a 
thousand years as one day. Compared with the age 
of the earth itself man's appearance upon it began but 
yesterday, and he has hardly yet emerged from the 
stage of infancy. 

And now what has been the direction of this pro- 
gress on its moral, that is its highest, side ? We start 
from a state of natural selfishness, in which the life 
of the individual man, to use the memorable words of 
Hobbes, is " solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short"; 
and we find ourselves in the era of Christian civilisa- 
tion, where — to quote T. H. Green again — " ' the 
recognition of the claims of a common humanity' is 
a phrase that has become so familiar... that we are apt 
to suspect it of being cant. Yet this very familiarity 
is proof of the extent to which the idea... has affected 
law and institutions 1 ." This humanitarian idea then is 
operative now, though its full realisation is our still 
distant ideal. But if it is fully realisable, the fact that 
this realisation is a ' far-off event ' does not, I would 
say again, very directly concern our present inquiry : 
for that, such eventual realisation is enough. " To 
any ethical student who finds its realisation difficult, I 
recommend," said Stuart Mill, "as a means of facilitating 
it, the second of M. Comte's two principal works, the 
Sy st erne de Politique Positive... \\. has superabundantly 
shown the possibility of giving to the service of 
humanity, even without the aid of belief in a Providence, 
1 Prolegome?ia to Ethics^ p. 228. 



The Humanitarian Ideal 135 

both the psychical power and the social efficacy of a 
religion ; making it take hold of human life, and colour 
all thought, feeling and action, in a manner of which 
the greatest ascendancy ever exercised by any religion 
may be but a type and foretaste 1 ." Kant, like Words- 
worth and Coleridge, was inspired with a like confidence 
by what he describes as the moral enthusiasm for the 
ideal displayed in the French Revolution 2 . It cannot 
be said, however, that either Kant or Mill attempted 
anything like a philosophical deduction of this faith in 
human progress and perfectibility. Other modern 
philosophers in plenty have attempted this, no doubt — 
for example Lessing, Herder, Krause, Hegel, and many 
besides ; but always on grounds more or less definitely 
theological. But to the pluralist this tendency is clear 
in itself so soon as we allow that all at least seek the 
good and therefore tend to replace an initial state of com- 
parative isolation and conflict by progressively higher 
forms of unity and cooperation. When the level of 
society and reason is reached, this tendency is no longer 
a blind impulse, it has become a conscious ideal. We 
emerge from the darkness, where we could only grope, 
into the light where we can see at least in which 
direction our ideal lies. " The practical struggle after 
the Better... makes the way by which the Best is to 
be more nearly approached plain enough " for further 
advance and also more feasible. This point has been 
worked out at length by T. H. Green. To the 
objection that it does not precisely define the course in 
which the advance is to be made we may reply in the 

1 Utilitarianism, p. 49. 

2 ' Streit der Facultaten,' Werke, Hartenstein's edn, vn. pp. 399 f. 



136 The Pluralistic Goal 

words of Professor Bosanquet : — " The difficulty of 
defining the best life does not trouble us, because we 
rely throughout on the fundamental logic of human 
nature qua rational. We think ourselves no more 
called upon to specify in advance what will be the 
details of the life which satisfies an intelligent being as 
such, than we are called upon to specify in advance 
what will be the details of the knowledge which satisfies 
an intelligent being as such. Wherever a human 
being touches practice, as wherever he touches theory, 
we find him driven on by his intolerance of contra- 
dictions towards shaping his life as a whole 1 ." Reason 
makes man master of his fate, and though slowly, yet 
surely, urges him onwards to the accomplishment of 
her perfect work. 

We come at length then to the question, stated at 
the outset, what sort of unity will the realisation of the 
rational ideal secure ? The answer may be very brief. 
" Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it 
is in heaven." To imagine this petition answered is 
to imagine humanity animated by a single wise and 
righteous will : every citizen would work harmoniously 
with every other, each one doing the highest and the 
best of which he is capable. The will of the Many 
and the will of the One would accord completely. But 
on the pluralist view the Divine will would only be a 
reality as it was the ideal towards which the whole 
creation moves, attained at length. The Kingdom 
would take the place of the ideal King : there would 
be a perfect commonwealth, but strictly no monarch, 

1 Cf. T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, Bk in. ch. iii. ; 
Bosanquet, The Philosophic Theory of the State, p. 181. 



The Lord's Prayer . 137 

other than ' the objective mind ' sovereign in every 
breast. 

Such is, I believe, in the main a fair presentation 
of the pluralistic Weltanschauung. The time it has 
occupied may I fear have tired the patience of many 
of you. It still remains to consider the objections 
to which it is liable — many of which will no doubt 
have occurred to you already — and the replies to 
them which the pluralist can make. But first it will 
repay us, I think, to take account of some underlying 
affinities between the pluralist position and that of 
certain philosophers commonly regarded as singular- 
ists, which seems to be directly contrary to it. 



LECTURE VII. 

THE PLURALISM OF HEGEL. 

The standpoint of pluralism in our day is, as we 
have seen, fundamentally historical. It is a philosophy 
of becoming rather than of being. It holds — as has 
been said of the philosophy of Aristotle — that "the 
ultimate metaphysical explanation of existence must 
be sought not so much in a prius out of which things 
emerge as in the goal towards which they move 1 ." 
That goal, so experience seems to show, is indeed 
an ultimate unity, which however presupposes a real 
plurality : but no attempt is made to conceive the 
plurality as due to a differentiation of a unity pre- 
existing ' before the world was ' and anterior to any 
conceivable experience. The three great singularistic 
philosophies of the nineteenth century however did 
venture on this bold enterprise, and it is, as we have 
seen, largely their conspicuous failure that has brought 
pluralism into vogue again. Now the last and chief 
of these, the philosophy of Hegel, is by common 
consent a philosophy of history in the widest sense, 
whatever it may be besides ; and mainly, if not solely, 
as such is it generally acknowledged to be of great 
positive value. It will then be interesting as well as 
instructive to compare Hegelianism with pluralism in 
respect of their common historical ground. Such a 
1 Pringle-Pattison, Hegelianism and Personality, ist edn, p. 82. 



Hegel at the Historical Standpoint 139 

comparison will become more significant when it is re- 
membered, as Hegel's critics urge and his exponents 
allow, that the so-called dialectical development of 
thought as such, in which he attempts to find the unity 
that transcends the seeming plurality, is only distinct 
from the historical development by being abstracted 
from it after reflexion has revealed its presence there 1 . 
Regarding things historically Hegel found develop- 
ment everywhere, he found not a statical world like 
that of the Eleatics but a dynamical one like that of 
Heracleitus. His leading ontological concept was 
more akin to the active subject of the pluralist Leibniz 
than to the indifferent substance of the singularist 
Spinoza. No doubt he reached in the end a unity 
which he called absolute ; but in his Philosophy of 
Nature and of Mind, where he first comes into touch 
with the real world, it is plurality that chiefly obtrudes 
itself. Yet, while recognising the " spectacle of a con- 
tingency that runs out into endless detail," Hegel 
treats it in the most contemptuous manner. The 
starry heavens that filled Kant with awe he thinks 
it fitting to call a ''luminous rash. ..as little deserving 
of -wonder as the rash on a human skin 2 ." The wealth 

1 Hegel has himself described philosophy as 'thinking considera- 
tion of things ' (denkende Betrachtung der Dinge, Encycl. § 2), and in 
his first systematic work, the Phenomenology of Mind, he undertakes 
to provide ' the ladder ' by which the beginner may ascend into the 
' ether ' where the dialectic transfiguration enacts itself. But he so 
far overreached his purpose that, like theatrical managers at a fair, 
he has given us on the boards outside, as it were, a preliminary and 
more or less tentative outline of his whole system. Hence he also 
called the Phenomenology his voyage of discovery : in this bewildering 
adventure psychology and history play the leading part. 

2 Naturphilosophie, § 268, p. 92. 



140 The Pluralism of Hegel 

of forms, organic and inorganic, that Nature presents, 
ought not as such, he maintained, '" to be rated higher 
than the equally casual fancies of the mind surrender- 
ing itself to its own caprices." "Contingent deter- 
mination from without has," he says again, " in the 
sphere of Nature its right place 1 ." But such language 
is mere bravado in the face of a serious difficulty, with 
which Hegel had not the patience to deal — or rather 
a difficulty with which a philosophy such as his could 
not have dealt at all. As Professor Pringle-Pattison 
has well said: "A system of rationalism which talks 
of what ' is determined not by reason but by sport and 
external accident' [as Hegel has done] must fairly be 
held to acknowledge a breakdown in its attempt to 
grasp the whole of existence 2 ." The first point we 
have to notice then is, that in admitting our inability 
to eliminate contingency Hegel has also admitted 
our inability to eliminate the plurality which it 
implies. " This impotence of Nature sets limits to 
philosophy " he tells us. Whether ' impotence ' is the 
right name for the fact may well be questioned ; but 
the one point that concerns us meanwhile is Hegel's 
recognition of the fact itself. Nature is for Hegel 
historically the first stage of the real world, and here 
at the outset he finds himself confronted and limited 
by the very plurality and contingency from which the 
pluralist too makes his start. What he calls the 
' impotence of Nature ' is historically just that inchoate 
state of things which the progress of history is sup- 
posed gradually to straighten out. 

1 Op. at. § 250, p 36. 

2 Hegelianism and Personality, 1st edn, p. 138. 



The Contingency of Nature 141 

Taking this progress in its widest extent, the pro- 
cesses of what we call nature fall within it, and are to 
be regarded, Hegel himself tells us, as a system of 
stages leading up to Mind, which emerges from Nature 
like the phoenix from its ashes 1 . But though one of 
the stages proceeds from the other, it is not, Hegel 
goes on to insist, " naturally generated out of the 
other ; on the contrary it [is generated] in the inner 
Idea that constitutes the ground of Nature 2 ." In other 
words his meaning seems to be that the process is 
really timeless, or as Goethe put it 

Natur hat weder Kern 

Noch Schale, 

Alles ist sie mit einem Male 3 . 

Accordingly in a lecture-note to the passage quoted 
he adds: "The notion puts all particularity in a general 
way into existence at once." In saying all this Hegel 
seems plainly to be trying to take back with one hand 
what he has yielded with the other. Or, to put it 
otherwise, he oscillates between two different kinds 
of development — the dialectical, which is timeless as 
well as abstract and general, and the historical which 
involves time-process and deals primarily with the 
concrete and particular. For us at any rate the ex- 
perience of this latter development is essential to our 
knowledge of the former, which — according to Hegel's 

1 Naturphilosophie, § 247, p. 24, § 376, p. 695. 

2 Op. cit. § 249, p. 32. 

3 This we might perhaps translate : 

Nature has neither shell 

Nor kernel, 

She's all at once in the eternal. 



142 The Pluralism of Hegel 

own teaching — belongs to its subsequent and latest 
phase. Indeed he has said more than once of philo- 
sophy in general what in his introduction he has 
expressly said of the Philosophy of Nature in par- 
ticular : — both as regards its origin and its elaboration 
it has experience for its presupposition and condition 1 . 
We might here fairly remind Hegel of a caution he 
has himself uttered : — " In respect of Mind and its 
manifestations [just as in the case of Nature] we must 
be on our guard lest we be misled by the well-meant 
endeavour after rational knowledge into attempting to 
represent as necessary or, as the phrase is, to construct 
a priori, phenomena to which the mark of contingency 
pertains 2 ." Even if it turn out that the dialectical 
method holds good for the timeless development, yet it 
is not a heuristic method ; at the outset philosophy as 
' the thinking consideration of things ' has to begin with 
its 'voyages of discovery.' The greater part of Hegel's 
Philosophy of Nature and of Mind is of this sort 3 . 

And here in common with the pluralist he finds, as 
we have already seen, plurality and contingency every- 
where, and we have now further to note that he finds 
also a gradual historical progress from nature to spirit, 
from nature as a ' bacchantic God ' to ' free spirit — the 
truth that knowing knows itself — a progress that in 
all essential points corresponds with that which in the 
exposition of pluralism I have already attempted to 
describe. All this, we have to insist, antecedes for 
us the timeless notional development which Hegel 

1 Cf. Encydopaedie, §§ 6, 7, 12, 38, 246. 

2 Op. cit. § 145- 

3 Cf. such categories as Mechanism, Chemism, Life, &c. 



Nature's Routine 143 

attempts to blend with it. The problem of time in 
relation to the dialectic is one of the many that Hegel 
left wholly to his successors : it is perhaps the most 
serious aspect of that ' ugly broad ditch ' with which 
Schelling taunted his quondam friend in a phrase em- 
bodying the most trenchant criticism the Hegelian 
philosophy has ever received. 

We come to a new point. Things are not alto- 
gether contingent or progressive, though there is con- 
tingency and progress everywhere : what we find is 
'uniformity flecked with diversity.' The uniformity 
in general we refer to nature as mechanical, and the 
diversity and progress to life or mind. This contrast 
too Hegel has noticed. "The changes in nature," he 
says, " indefinitely manifold as they are, exhibit only 
a routine that is ever repeated : in nature there happens 
nothing new under the sun.... It is only in the changes 
taking place on the spiritual platform that novelty 
comes to the fore." Again he speaks of nature as 
"a system of unconscious thoughts, as an intelligence 
that, as Schelling said, is petrified 1 ." Such language 
at once reminds us of the distinction between nahtra 
naturans and natura naturata as the pluralist inter- 
prets it. The former answers to nature as full of con- 
tingency, which is the very opposite of routine; the 
latter to nature as mechanical and devoid of novelty, 
in itself but the 'corpse of the understanding,' as Hegel 
calls it ; the dead self on which we rise to higher things, 
as the pluralist maintains. The mechanization of habit, 
dexterity as consisting in making the body the uncon- 

1 Philosophie der Gesc/iichte, 1837, p. 51. Encyclopaedic, § 24, 
Lecture Note 1. 



1 44 The Pluralism of Hegel 

scious instrument of the soul, in and through which it 
expresses itself as if the body were the soul's work of 
art, and so forth — all this Hegel recognises to the full 
and describes in detail. It cannot indeed be said that 
he expressly traces back these psychological facts as 
far as the pluralist attempts to do ; but it might be 
fairly maintained that his view of nature justifies such 
a procedure. 

In the first place Hegel was no dualist: the whole 
process of nature is to become spirit, and spirit it 
is in itself or potentially from the beginning. But 
actually at the outset it is infinite isolation or dis- 
memberment ( Vereinzelung), and its unity is still to 
seek. It advances from this to the natural individuality 
or particularity of physical bodies and finally to the 
subjective individuality of organisms 1 . At this level 
sentience emerges and we pass over into the realm of 
mind, the individual existing for itself. The earlier, 
so-called inorganic processes pluralism explicitly inter- 
prets, in Leibnizian fashion, as also in some measure 
sentient and conative. In his Philosophy of N attire 
Hegel was too much under the influence of Schelling 
and dominated by his 'polarity myth' for this. But 
occasionally he comes very near to the Leibnizian 
standpoint. Thus he describes a soul as such, as " in 
itself the totality of nature ; as individual soul it is 
a monad ; it is itself the posited totality of its particular 
world, so that this is shut up within it, is its content.'' 
And again : " In contrast to the macrocosm of Nature 
as a whole, the soul can be designated the microcosm, 
in which the former is compressed (zusantmengedrangt) 

1 Naturphilosophie^ § 252. 



Nature to become Spirit 145 

and its externality thereby overcome 1 ." This meta- 
phorical language, by the way, looks very like non- 
sense : how the soul is going to condense the world 
or how compression is to put an end to externality is 
not evident. But what Hegel means, we may suppose, 
is what Leibniz also meant: the world is for every soul 
a presented, or — in the language of the first passage — 
a ' posited totality ' — or continuum. Now all this, it 
must be remembered, is said, not of the higher stages 
of mental development, which Hegel distinguishes as 
spirit (Geist); it is said of what he calls the natural 
and the sentient soul, the stage of obscurity (Dunkel- 
heii) before the soul has attained to a conscious and 
intelligible content 2 — the stage, in a word, of Leibniz's 
' confused perception.' And who is to say how far 
back this obscurity extends? All we know of it we 
know because we do not begin with it but approach it 
from the light and interpret it in terms of what it has 
become. And this is the method of pluralism. 

But now, it may be said, in the second place — 
indeed it has been said by a thoroughgoing Hegelian 
— that this principle of interpreting the lower on the 
analogy of the higher was recognised by Hegel too. 
Comparing the opposite processes of evolution and 
emanation — or, as I have proposed to call it, devolu- 
tion — both of which have been employed in the inter- 
pretation of nature, he expresses a preference for the 
latter. " To proceed from the more perfect to the 
less perfect is more advantageous," he says; " for then 
we have the type of the completed organism before 

1 Philosophy of Mind, Encycl. in. §§ 391, 403. Cf. also §352, 
Zusatz, Encycl. 11. 2 Op. cit. § 404. 

w. 10 



146 The Pluralism of Hegel 

us " : albeit he held both methods to be ' one-sided 
and superficial 1 .' How then should we proceed, how, 
in fact, do we proceed? " It is clear," said G. H. 
Lewes, '<" that we should never rightly understand 
vital phenomena were we to begin our study of life 
by contemplating its simplest manifestations in the 
animal series ; we can only understand the Amoeba 
and the Polype by a light reflected from the study of 
Man." In quoting this passage the late Professor 
Ritchie, the Hegelian I just now referred to, adds the 
remark: "What makes it seem possible for the scientific 
investigator ' to begin at the beginning ' is the fact that 
he is not doing so. The student of the Amoeba hap- 
pens to be, not an Amoeba, but a specimen of a highly 
developed vertebrate, and knows at least something 
about the differentiated organs and functions of his 
own body 2 ." What we do then is by means of our 
knowledge of the higher to interpret the lower, while 
at the same time recognising that the actual process 
has been a development of the lower upwards towards 
the higher. With all this we may fairly say that 
Hegel was in complete agreement, once we have dis- 
allowed his attempts to play fast and loose with the 
two distinct kinds of developments — the historical and 
the dialectic. He does interpret the lower by the 
higher, he does admit an actual historical evolution, 
and he does insist that Nature is potentially mental 
from the first, so that the historical evolution is no 

1 Naturphilosophie, Encycl. II. § 249, p. 35. 

2 G. H. Lewes, Study of Psychology •, p. 122; D. G. Ritchie, 
1 Darwin and Hegel ' in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 
vol. 1. p. 59- 



The Higher the Key to the Lower 147 

generatio equivoca. " The appearance," he remarks, 
"as if [the existence of] Mind were brought about 
through an Other, is disposed of by Mind itself; for 
this — so to say — has the supreme ingratitude to resolve 
and mediate that through which it seems to be pro- 
duced, to reduce it to dependence on itself and to 
establish its own complete independence 1 ." 

Let us now look at Hegel's handling of this evo- 
lution a little closer. His Philosophy of History is 
professedly little more than a philosophy of political 
history. The progress that it traces is the progress 
of freedom as realised in the objective mind or society; 
but freedom, it should be observed, is regarded as 
identical with spiritual perfection generally; and so he 
describes 'world-history' as "the exhibition of mind 
as it works out the knowledge of what it is in itself." 
The realisation of this ideal, he explains, is the final 
end, the working principle, the informing notion of 
history. But, as such, a principle is only general, 
abstract, and potential ; in order to its realisation a 
further factor is essential : in history proper this factor 
is the activity of human beings. But an end for which 
I am to be active must be in some sense my end : even 
if it have other aspects that do not concern me, still it 
is my own satisfaction that makes it interesting to me. 
He concludes then "that absolutely nothing is brought 
to pass without the interest of those who actively co- 
operated in it:... that nothing great in the world is 
accomplished without passion' 2 ." 

Reason the card, but passion is the gale. 

1 Philosophy of Mind, Encycl. ill. § 381, p. 23. 

2 Philosophie der Geschichte, 1837, p. 28. 

10 — 2 



1 48 The Pluralism of Hegel 

The history of the world in the widest sense, how- 
ever, goes further back than this ; and though Hegel 
regarded it as neither fitting nor worthy of philosophy 
to take up the story before rationality comes upon the 
scene, he nevertheless has some introductory remarks 
concerning the pre-historic. These are important as 
further bearing out what has just been said about the 
spiritualistic continuity of the whole process of evolu- 
tion as Hegel conceived it, and as making clearer 
the pluralistic basis that it implies. Having insisted 
that " nothing happens, nothing is accomplished save 
as the individuals actively concerned in it secure their 
own satisfaction," he continues : " But the world's his- 
tory does not begin with any conscious end, such as 
we find in particular centres of men. The simple 
impulse to live together has already the conscious end 
of security for life and property, and so soon as this 
life in common is attained the end is [further] enlarged. 
The world's history begins only potentially (i.e. as 
Nature) with its general end, the full realisation of 
the notion of spirit. That end is its inner, nay its 
inmost unconscious impulse, and the entire business of 
the world-history is the labour of bringing it to con- 
sciousness. Thus making its appearance in the form 
of natural beings, natural wills, what has been called 
the subjective side [of history] is straightway present 
for itself 1 ." Translated into pluralistic language this 
amounts to saying : A plurality of conative beings at 
first casually interacting in pursuance of their several 
particular and immediate impulses gradually come to 
have ends and continually widening ends in common, 
1 Op. cit. p. 29. 



The World-Spirit 149 

thereby advancing towards the complete realisation of 
the one objective end of history that is now to be 
regarded as its potential principle from the first. 

We are not then surprised to find Hegel too 
describing and illustrating — as we have already done 
under the title ' heterogony of ends 1 ' — the fact that in 
the course of the world's history the actions of man- 
kind are continually realising ends that they neither 
intended nor foresaw. But the explanation which he 
seeks to give of this fact is very different from that of 
the pluralist. He regards human interests and actions 
in the first instance simply as instruments and means. 
Through them the absolute final purpose of the world's 
history is carried out, but carried out as something 
beyond and external to them — just as a house is erected 
by means of natural forces and elements that have no 
concern with its inner end, which in fact is to keep 
them at bay. But this illustration, which please under- 
stand is Hegel's own 2 , at once and very pointedly 
raises the question : Where in the case of the world's 
history is the guiding and controlling mind to be found 
that corresponds to the architect in the case of the 
house ? It must have a place somewhere in one or 
other of the three great divisions of Hegel's philo- 
sophy. But where ? Obviously not in the Logic, for 
that lies on the other side of everything like his- 
torical and natural development, as Hegel expressly 

1 Lect iv. above, p. 79. 

2 Philosophie der Geschichte, 1840, p. 34. This illustration was 
omitted by Gans, the editor of the 1837 edition, who professed to 
follow Hegel's own revision ; but it was inserted in the second 
edition by Hegel's son Karl, Gans having in the meantime died. 



150 The Pluralism of Hegel 

maintained. It is the realm of pure thought, not the 
realm of ends. In the Philosophies of Nature and of 
Mind the Logic is applied ; but their contents, as such, 
do not enter into it or concern it. Perception, imagina- 
tion and the like, which belong to self-conscious mind, 
are to be as completely excluded from logic as are the 
forms of space and time and the phenomena, inorganic 
or organic, which fill them out. The ' notion ' is not to 
be regarded as an act of the self-conscious, subjective, 
intellect : even the term ' objective thought ' is awk- 
ward as applied to it, for thought is usually referred 
only to mind or consciousness, and objective in like 
manner primarily only to the unconscious 1 . 

Let us turn next to the Philosophy of Mind ; for in 
his Philosophy of History Hegel often refers to the 
1 world-spirit ' as that which directs and controls the 
actions of men to subserve its own supreme end. But 
what does Hegel himself tell us in the Philosophy of 
Mind about this ' world-spirit ' ? " This movement," 
he says referring to the course of history, " is the way, 
whereby the spiritual substance is liberated — the deed, 
whereby the absolute final purpose of the world is 
accomplished in it, [whereby] the spirit that at first 
exists only potentially (an sich)... becomes the world- 
spirit 2 ." Actually then, it would seem, the world- 
spirit corresponds to the realised plan of the house 
rather than to the architect who shapes and controls 
the materials. A plan does not ordinarily carry itself 
out. Still, it may be urged, a mere illustration is not 
to be pressed. That, of course, is true ; but on the 

1 Cf. Logik, in. pp. 21, 18; Encyclopaedic, § 24. 

2 Philosophy of Mind, Encycl. in. § 549 init. 



The Dialectic and the Time-illusion 151 

other hand it is to be remembered that, according 
to Hegel's own statement, the world-spirit is only 
potentially present at first, only gradually attains to 
" consciousness and self-consciousness and so to the 
revelation and reality of its perfect nature, its nature 
\_Wesen\ as it is in and for itself" — a position which, 
as we may see presently, carries important conse- 
quences. It has to be remembered too that Hegel, 
as we have already seen, makes a point of insisting 
that the plan or principle or end of history needs 
means and instruments in order to its determinate 
realisation and is in itself only 'general, abstract, not 
completely real.' 

But at this juncture some disciple of Hegel may 
refer us back to the Logic for the true meaning of 
teleology. There Hegel tells us "we may say that 
in teleological activity the end is the beginning, the 
consequence is the ground, the effect is the cause, 
a case of becoming is a case of what has become, 
in it only what is already existing comes into existence, 
and so forth 1 ." Afterwards, in the corresponding 
section of the so-called Smaller Logic, he expresses 
himself still more strongly. "As a matter of fact," 
he here says, "the object is potentially [an sick~] the 
notion ; and so when the notion, as end, is realised in 
the object, this is only the manifestation of the inner 
nature of the object itself. Objectivity is thus, as it 
were, only a covering under which the notion lies 

concealed The consummation of the infinite End, 

therefore, consists merely in setting aside (aufheben) 
the illusion [which makes it seem] as if the end was 

1 Logik, in. p. 228. 



152 The Pluralism of Hegel 

not yet accomplished. It is under this illusion that 
we live, and at the same time it is this illusion alone 
that stirs us to activity [das Bethdtigende~\ and on 
which our interest in the world depends. The Idea 
in its process makes for itself that illusion — posits an 
Other over against itself — and its activity consists in 
setting this illusion aside 1 ." The serpent with its tail 
in its mouth is an ancient mystic symbol, and if Hegel, 
like Herbert Spencer, had bethought himself of a 
book-plate to adorn his theory of evolution, doubtless 
it is this that he would have chosen. Moreover a 
devoted disciple has provided the motto : — Serpens 
nisi serpentem comederit n on fit draco' 2 . It would be 
needless for our purpose to spend time in discussing 
the validity of a position that cannot even be stated 
without contradicting itself: it is sufficient to observe 
that an illusion that embraces the whole range of 
experience and is declared to be the source alike of all 
truth in theory and all zest in practice is no illusion 
for us. This appeal to the Logic then does not help 
us in our search : it only confronts us once more with 
the problem as to the relation of the dialectic to time. 

Coming back now to the historical again — which 
the employment of means and instruments to accom- 
plish with much pain and labour a superhuman end, 
in any case implies — there is only the Philosophy of 
Nature left. In Nature, from or in which the world's 

1 Encyclopaedic, 1. § 212. In the phrase ' sets an Other over 
against itself,' — setzt ein Anderer sick gegeniiber, Hegel, like Fichte 
before him, seems to be trying to read his own philosophy in the 
German word for object, i.e. Gegcnsta?id. 

2 J. E. Erdmann, Geschichte der neuereu Philosophic, Bd in. 
Abth. ii. p. 841. 



Twofold Relation of Nature to Mind 153 

process begins, can we find the guiding executive 
whose working consummates itself in the fulness of 
time ? But if it be true that even in the realm of 
mind the world-spirit works at first underground like 
a mole, to use Hegel's own simile, and only at length 
emerges into consciousness and self-consciousness, 
surely we cannot expect to find it enacting the part 
of a supreme and intelligent director in Nature, where 
contingency runs riot like a bacchantic god and its 
impotence sets limits to philosophy, which that cannot 
overcome 1 . In his explication of the notion of mind 
Hegel begins : " Mind has for us Nature as its pre- 
supposition, the truth of which and so the absolute 
first of which it [nevertheless] is." Again, speaking 
of its development, he says : " Mind is preceded not 
only by the logical Idea but also by external Nature. 
For the knowledge already involved in the logical idea 
is only the notion of knowledge that we think, not the 
knowledge that is there for itself, not actual mind but 
merely its possibility. The actual mind, which alone 
is our object-matter in the science of mind, has Nature 
for its proximate, as it has the logical Idea for its 
primary, presupposition 2 ." This very oracular language 
is another instance of the seemingly double-dealing of 
Hegel's circular theory of development, and once again 
we must claim to distinguish sharply between the dia- 
lectical development — where " the Idea thought in its 
repose is indeed timeless " — and the historical develop- 
ment, where the Idea as concrete appears to be "not 
at rest but an existence progressing in time 3 ." What 

1 Cf. above, p. 140. 2 Philosophy of Mind, § 381. 

3 Cf. Geschichte der Phi/osophie, 1. p. 46. 



154 The Pluralism of Hegel 

Hegel's explication comes to then seems to be this : 
Nature is ' Mind out of itself from the abstract stand- 
point of the Logic ; but it is Mind not yet 'come to 
itself from the concrete point of view of historical 
development. Seeing that in the Logic we have not 
actual mind, not knowledge but only its possibility, 
it may well be questioned whether this mere possibility 
can become actual by passing out of itself: it may 
even be doubted whether mind out of itself can be 
called mind at all. No wonder, then, that thinkers 
largely in sympathy with Hegel — as, for example, 
von Hartmann, and still more, Volkelt — regarded his 
system as really a philosophy of the unconscious ; or 
that others, trained in the Hegelian school, like Strauss 
and Feuerbach, resolved it into a refined naturalism. 
From such constructions there seems to be no escape 
unless we take Hegel's unconscious nature in the 
Leibnizian or pluralistic fashion. And the continuity 
of the Hegelian historical evolution, which we have 
already noted, may be held to favour such an inter- 
pretation. 

No doubt the objection will at once occur, that for 
Hegel Nature is essentially a unity that only appears 
as a plurality. But is that after all so clear as at first 
sight it seems — assuming, of course, that we ignore 
the desperate leap from the Logic to Nature, in other 
words disallow any continuity between the dialectical 
and the historical evolution ? Not only does the con- 
tingency of Nature imply plurality, as already said, 
but Hegel repeatedly lays emphatic stress on what 
he calls the externality (Aussereinander) of Nature, 
not simply in relation to mind, but to itself; and on 



Nature as Plurality 155 

its infinite separation ( Vereinzelung) where the unity 
of form is still ideal, potential, and therefore still to 
seek, Nature remaining meanwhile an ' unresolved 
contradiction.' "Its differences...," he says, "are 
existences more or less independent of each other ; 
through their original unity indeed they stand in 
relation with one another, so that no one is con- 
ceivable without the rest ; but this relation is for them 
in a higher or lower degree external 1 ." Even when 
he has advanced so far as the Philosophy of Mind 
he represents the soul as at first only natural, not yet 
sentient or actual ; and a propos of this earliest stage 
he remarks : — " As the light breaks up into an infinite 
multitude of stars, so also the general Nature-soul 
breaks up into an infinite multitude of individual souls ; 
only with this difference, that, whereas the light has 
the appearance of existing independently of the stars, 
the general Nature-soul attains to actual existence 
only in the separate souls 2 ." This comes very near 
to presentationism or the 'mind-dust theory' and would 
more than satisfy the pluralists of our day. 

So far we have been considering Hegel's interpre- 
tation of that heterogony of ends which in common 
with the pluralists he recognises throughout the course 
of the world's history. He attributes it to what he 
was fond of calling ' the absolute cunning of reason ' 
or the world-spirit in ensuring that the contingency 
of all things finite shall subserve its own supreme end. 
This end so far we have found him regarding as 

1 Cf. Philosophie der Natur, §§ 247, 248, 252; Philosophy of 
Mind, § 381, Zusatz. 

2 Philosophy of Mind, § 390. 



156 The Pluralism of Hegel 

external to, and independent of, its instruments ; and 
even as directed against them, as a house is built by 
means of the forces of nature in order to set them at 
defiance. But we have been unable to find in Hegel's 
philosophy any evidence of this world-spirit in its role 
of superintending overruler. We have found the house 
in progress, but no architect ; or rather we have found 
the whole metaphor bursting its bounds, as Hegel would 
say ; for the completed house is to be the architect. 

Does the house then build itself? So the pluralist 
would say ; in so saying, however, he refuses to 
regard the finite agents in history as simply means 
and instruments to purely alien ends. And Hegel 
after all does likewise : as instance, the following : — 
" If now we are content to see individuals, their ends 
and the satisfaction of these, sacrificed, their happiness 
generally abandoned to the dominion of chance, to 
which it belongs ; if we are content to consider them 
in general, as falling under the category of means, still 
they have one side which we hesitate even in com- 
parison with the Highest to regard only in this light... 
viz. their moral and religious side." But he goes much 
farther, and presently continues: — "If we speak of a 
means we imagine it in the first instance as only 
external to the end and as having no part in that. 
In fact, however, natural things generally, let alone 
what is higher, — nay, the commonest lifeless objects 
that are used as means — must be so constituted as to 
answer to the end or have something in them that 
they share with it. Men least of all stand in that 
entirely external relation as means to the end of 
reason... on the contrary they have a part in that end 



Individuals always Ends 157 

of reason and are, just because of this, ends of them- 
selves 1 ." Now we must here, I think, admit that 
a very close approximation to the pluralisms theory 
of evolution is at least implied. Such approximation 
appears still closer when we take into account what 
Hegel has said a propos of the 'absolute cunning of 
reason' — how it stands aside and leaves things to inter- 
act according to their own nature ; rubbing together 
and frustrating each other, while it never itself directly 
interferes — how it allows full scope to human passions 
and interests, paying the tribute of transient existence 
[Dasein und V er gang lie hkeil) not out of itself but out 
of these, while it foresees the result to be not the 
accomplishment of our designs but of its own 2 . This 
very deistic account of an assumed spectator of the 
world's history, whether called reason or God or Provi- 
dence — and Hegel in turn calls it all three — we may 
leave entirely aside, for we have been able to find it 
only as the culminating Idea of the dialectical develop- 
ment and as the goal of the historical. All that 
immediately interests us is the near approach that 
Hegel here makes to the pluralistic position, which — 
as we have seen — is that all the agents at work in 
history, from the lowest to the highest, are not 
primarily means to external ends, not primarily things 
but persons in the widest sense 3 ; that by their mutual 
interaction and striving — since all seek the good — 

1 Philosophie der Geschichte, 1837, p. 33. 

2 Encyclopaedic, 1. § 209. 

3 In saying this I have in view an interesting book written mainly 
from the pluralistic standpoint, which I have only just come across — 
Person und Sache by L. W. Stern, 1906. 



1 58 The Pluralism of Hegel 

gradually eliminate the contingency, which their com- 
parative isolation — Hegel's primitive Vereinzelung — 
at first entails, and gradually bring about the reign 
of reason and right. And this position could hardly 
be more concisely stated than in words that are Hegel's 
own : — " The history of the world shows only how 
spirit comes gradually to the consciousness and will 
of the truth : this dawns upon it ; [then] it discerns 
the chief features ; eventually it attains to the full 
consciousness of it 1 ." The long introduction to his 
Philosophy of History is full of similar passages which 
suggest not a preconceived plan steadily carried out 
by a single overruling mind employing passive instru- 
ments, but a living organization slowly and tentatively 
achieved by the long and painful efforts of generations 
of struggling individuals. Der Trieb der Perfecti- 
bilitdt ist die Bestimmung der Menschen, Hegel has 
said, and all that history shows is this Trieb at 
work. 

But the unity of the whole is the last word of 
philosophy: "All philosophy is nothing else than the 
study of the determinations (Bestimmtmgen) of unity... 
always unity, but in such a way that this is always 
further determined" said Hegel. And so too says 
the pluralist to-day : how far the two agree about the 
determination we must consider in the following lectures, 
when we shall have to look closer into this aspect of 
pluralism itself. 

1 Philosophie der Geschichte, 1837, p. 51. 



LECTURE VIII 



THE HEGELIAN UNITY. 



We have seen that there is a strong undercurrent 
of pluralism running through the whole of Hegel's 
philosophy regarded as ' the thinking consideration 
of things ' in distinction from his attempted ' dialectical 
development of pure thought.' But of course every 
philosophy must recognise both plurality and unity 
in some fashion, the important question then still 
remains : Is the unity with Hegel, as with the pluralist, 
result, or is it ground and presupposition ; historically 
is it the starting-point or is it the goal : in other words 
Is there a unity differentiated into a plurality or is 
there a plurality organized into a unity ? Here again 
I think we shall find much to justify us in affirming 
the second alternative. No doubt there is something 
to be said on the other side ; of that the disruption 
of the Hegelian school within five years of the master's 
death is sufficient evidence. The thinkers on the 
Hegelian right held that Hegel had taught the abso- 
lute priority of the unity as personal Creator and 
Providence. It is true that he had said in so many 
words that the content of philosophy and of religion 
is the same, the difference lying only in their form ; 
the form of the one being logical (Begriff), that of 



160 The Hegelian Unity 

the other being figurative (Vorstellung). It is true 
that he had found speculative interpretations for the 
Christian dogmas of the Trinity, the incarnation, the 
atonement, and even the sacraments. Nevertheless 
the verdict of succeeding generations has been given 
almost unanimously in favour of the thinkers of the 
Hegelian left. But they disavowed altogether Hegel's 
attempt to incorporate the leading tenets of Christianity 
into his philosophy of absolute idealism, and main- 
tained its essentially pantheistic structure. Indeed it 
would nowadays seem needless to refer to any other 
interpretation, were it not that the leading exponents 
of Hegel amongst us have been till lately members 
of the right. The appeal to Hegel's doctrine of the 
Trinity as evidence of the theistic character of his 
philosophy is particularly unfortunate. So long as the 
Christian dogma is — so to say — read into it between 
the lines, it might pass as such. But taken, as it 
ought to be, with the context of the Hegelian philo- 
sophy as a whole, the doctrine is obviously and trans- 
parently pantheistic. In place of a triple personality 
there is no personality at all. The Trinity is simply 
equated to the main triad of the Hegelian system, 
Logic, Nature, Spirit as severally Thesis, Antithesis 
and Synthesis. Let us briefly consider each in turn. 
In an important and often-quoted paragraph de- 
fining the nature of Logic, Hegel concludes : — " Logic 
accordingly is to be understood as the system of pure 
reason, as the realm of pure thought. This realm is 
the truth as it is unveiled in and for itself. We can 
therefore say that this content sets God before us as 
he is in his eternal essence before the creation of 



Hegel's Doctrine of the Trinity 161 

Nature and finite spirit 1 ." God the Father then, or 
rather what Hegel describes as the Kingdom of the 
Father, answers to this realm of pure thought, this 
\ realm of shadows,' as he proceeds a few pages later 
to call it. All the unity we can expect to find here 
then is an ideal unity. But no, the orthodox Hegelian 
may reply, within the Kingdom of the Father we find, 
according to Hegel's own teaching, the generation 
of the Son and the procession of the Spirit : we have 
the archetype *of all community, divine love. " In 
friendship, in love," Hegel himself has said, -' I give 
up my abstract personality and by so doing win it 
back as concrete personality. The true in personality 
then is just this, to gain personality through this 
absorbing and being absorbed in the other." Yes, 
but in the case of the Trinity what exactly is this 
other? Had Hegel been content to leave this 'silent 
mystery ' as he calls it still fermenting in the thoughts 
of men as he professed to find it, or had he been 
content on religious grounds to accept it as the directly 
revealed truth, which Christian theology proclaims it 
to be, we should have nothing to say. Nothing at 
least, unless it were to protest against a philosopher 
meddling with what is avowedly either mystical or 
'revealed.' But he essays to explain it. "The relation 
of father and son is taken from organic life and is only 
figuratively used... and so never entirely corresponds 
with what ought to be expressed." Philosophy alone 
is competent to put the truth in adequate form and 
this form is the dialectic development through the 
moments or functions of the so-called Subjective 
1 Logik, i. p. 35. 
w. 11 



1 62 The Hegelian Unity 

notion, through universality and particularity to indi- 
viduality. In Hegel's fearfully laboured expositions 
this is the only thing that stands out clearly. 

The so-called Kingdom of the Father is, it is true, 
itself a triad within the first moment — universality ; and 
though the notion becomes increasingly adequate and 
concrete as we advance, still the whole movement falls 
within the realm of pure thought. Even this triune 
God, if we like so to call it, is still without the world 
and so not God, as Hegel himself has said in so many 
words. The terms which in the course of a few pages 
he applies to the first person of the Trinity are con- 
clusive so far. " The eternal Idea that is not yet 
posited in its reality but is itself still the abstract 
Idea"; " God as simply the Father is not yet the 
true"; "The abstract God, the Father, is the universal " ; 
" This universal implies the complete Idea, but also 
only implies it, is only potentially Idea." In keeping 
with such language are the various — chiefly neo- 
Platonic — attempts to reach the truth, which Hegel 
thought deserving of recognition ; in the course of 
which we come across such phrases, as for example, 
the *Oi>, the Abyss or Deep, that is as good as to say, 
what is as yet empty ; the TrpowaTcop who is a Father 
only mediately, the 7rpoapxrj, He who was before the 
beginning; and so on 1 . The 'process' within this 
universal Hegel describes partly in biological, partly — 
as we have already seen — in ethical, language, partly, 
that is to say, as life, partly as love. " Life," he says, 

1 Philosophic der Religion, 2te Aufl. 1840, Bd n. p. 244, Eng. 
trans, by Speirs and Sanderson, in. p. 30. Though references are given 
to this the translations in the text have been made independently. 



The Kingdom of the Father 163 

"preserves itself, preservation means passing into 
difference, into the struggle with particularity, means 
finding itself to be distinct over against inorganic 
nature. Life is thus only a result, since it has gene- 
rated itself; is a product that in the second place again 
produces :... what is produced is already there from the 
beginning. The same holds true in love and love 
returned 1 ." Obviously this is the figurative language 
appropriate to religion, which for Hegel was but one 
remove from art: for philosophy such forms are still 
inadequate. Accordingly Hegel has no sooner elabo- 
rated his comparisons than he proceeds to tone them 
down. For the divine life there is no external; and 
so here, "the process," he says, "is thus nothing but 
the play of self-preservation, of making sure of one's 
self 2 ." So again, having described love as between 
two persons, he then characterizes the divine love, 
as involving "this distinction and the nullity of this 
distinction, a play which is not in earnest, the dis- 
tinction being just posited as abolished 3 ." In the end 
then we find Hegel coming back to the realm of pure 
thought as alone furnishing an adequate account of 
this process as he all along maintained. Here, he 
says, it is manifest "that every definite notion is this — 
to set itself aside (sick selbst aufkeben), as being its own 
contradiction, consequently to become its own difference 
and to posit itself as such. And thus the Notion itself 
still retains this one-sidedness or finitude,that it is some- 
thing subjective ; the determinations, the differences are 
posited only as ideal, not in fact as differences. This 

1 Op. cit. 11. p. 241, E.t in. p. 26. 

2 Op. cit. 11. p. 241, E.t. in. p. 27. 3 Op. cit. 11. p. 227, E.t. in. p. 11. 

11 — 2 



164 The Hegelian Unity 

is the Notion that objectifies itself 1 ." But again the 
question recurs : What exactly is this objectification ? 

Passing so to the Kingdom of the Son we come 
upon the Other, Difference, the Objective, as fact and 
not merely as thought : this is the region of ' infinite 
particularity 1 not of * total particularity' or universality. 
Here plurality precedes unity. Referring back to the 
Kingdom of the Father — wherein the differentiation 
" is only a relation of God, of the Idea to itself, only 
a play of love with itself, in which it never attains to 
the seriousness of Other-being, to separation and dis- 
union (Entzweiung)" — Hegel remarks "that we have 
not yet got to difference in its completeness, in the 
form that peculiarly belongs to it (in seiner Eigenthiim- 

lichkeit) In order then that difference may be, and 

in order that it may come to its rights, Other-being is 
requisite, so that what is differentiated may be Other- 
being as beent (Seyendes) 2 " — to use Dr Hutchison 
Stirling's term. This Other, let go as something 
independent, is the World in general, that is Nature 
and finite minds. But now comes the difficulty : how 
are the Son and the World related ? How does the 
playful, ideal differentiation, which amounts only to 
abstract difference in general, stand towards the com- 
plete and actual differentiation of a World let go in 
deadly earnest, in such wise ' let go ' that Hegel, like 
Schelling, can even refer to it as der Abfall der Idee, 
wherein the Idea is 'estranged from itself ? This is 
again the question we raised just now : what exactly 
is the Other ? 

1 Op. cit. 11. p. 232, E.t. in. p. 16. 

2 Op. cit. 2nd ed. 11. p. 249, E.t. 111. p. 35. 



The Kingdom of the Son 165 

If we stop at the Other in the Kingdom of the 
Father, we have not gone far enough ; but if we ad- 
vance to the Other in the Kingdom of the Son, we seem 
to have gone too far. In the one we have merely what, 
stripped of all more concrete metaphors, Hegel can 
only describe as ' a movement ' in the realm of pure 
thought : in fact, however, when we look closer, it is 
hard to see how we can have even this. For though 
it be true that every ' definite notion ' implies negation, 
it is not easy to see why or how the ' pure notion, the 
notion apart from all limitation,' should imply it \ 
However even granting that this dialectical movement 
is in itself conceivable, the only point that interests us 
is that in it difference does not — to use Hegel's own 
phrase — "get its rights, the right of diversity (Ver- 
schiedenheity or plurality, as, in view of the context, 
we may I think render it. Now it is in the Kingdom 
of the Son, he tells us, that this " advance to further 
determination takes place :... We thus enter into the 
sphere of determination, i.e. of space and the world 
of finite mind 2 ." And here Hegel, as I have said, has 
too much on his hands. And he is far from oblivious 
of the fact. 

1 We may talk of ' subjective need ' in a finite life, a finite 
friendship; but to suppose that the content of the 'divine notion,' 
the first person in the Hegelian Trinity, implies anything analogous 
to this must surely appear meaningless, when we recall how that 
content is described. Well, then, may a critic describe this " life in 
the categories as the most inconceivable thing in the world" (A. Drews, 
Die deutsche Speculation seit Kant : das Wesen des Absoluten und die 
Persbnlichkeit Gottes, 2te Ausg. 1895, Bd 1. p. 248). It is certainly 
the veriest travesty of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. 

2 Op. cit. 11. pp. 250 f., E.t. in. pp. 37 f. 



1 66 The Hegelian Unity 

Two very different ' movements,' or processes, are 
clearly implied, but Hegel feels bound to show that 
these two are somehow one. So he refers to them as 
two moments in the analysis of the Son, which are 
kept apart and yet both contained in Him. The 
difficulty is really the old one of getting across the 
famous ' ditch.' How much at a loss Hegel is>is shown 
by the fact that he thinks it illuminating to refer to 
Jacob Boehm's description of ' the transition ' between 
the two moments of the Son : how " the first only- 
begotten Lucifer imagined himself in himself, advanced 
to being and so fell ; and how immediately the eternally 
Only-begotten took his place 1 ." On the strength of 
this piece of utter mysticism Hegel proceeds to refer 
to "a state before time was when the angels, God's 
children, sang his praises," and then more exactly 
defines this 'state' as the relation of thought to its 
object. Apparently then not only was there a Trinity 
in the eternal realm of pure thought, the Kingdom of 
the Father, but a complete and harmonious choir of 
ideas as well, reminding us of Plato's ideal world. 
Apparently too the world in space and time was after 
all not ' freely let go ' but, in advancing to its rights 
of Other-being and plurality, really revolted and fell. 
Without attempting to resolve this difficulty as to the 
Abfall der Idee and two Only-begotten, we may con- 
tent ourselves with noticing that it furnishes Hegel 
with an additional reason for distinguishing the two 

1 This passage calls to mind Goethe's account of his early 
theological speculations, in Dichtung und Wahrheit, bk vn. He too 
speaks of Lucifer 'believing that he found himself in himself and 
of the creation and fall that resulted. 



The two forms of { the Other' 167 

and keeping them apart ; for otherwise the false 
position would arise "as if" to quote his words, "the 
eternal Son of the Father, the Godhead existing 
objectively 1 for itself, were the same 'as the world, 
as if by that only this were to be understood 2 ." And 
yet, notwithstanding all, he still maintains that the 
two are implicitly the same : the Idea, that is to say, 
is in itself the same, merely the form is different : it is 
only figurative thought ( Vorstellung) that holds the two 
apart as two wholly diverse spheres and acts. More 
explicitly, Hegel's final solution of the difficulty — in 
spite of all that he has said about divine history as the 
process of self-differentiation, of God without the world 
not being God, and much beside — is simply to sweep 
away time and declare the world of finitude to be only 
the erepov, limited, negative etc., that as such has no 
truth. Regarded from the point of view of time, " it is 
merely an instant (Augenblick), like the gleam of the 
lightning-flash, which in its appearing has immediately 
disappeared. But what we have really got to do is to 
get rid of every time-determination, whether duration 
or the now.... The world as temporal is just the region 
of contradiction, the Idea in a form inadequate to it 3 ." 
The one Other then has two forms, one true and the 
other untrue ; the unveiled, eternal Other of the realm 
of pure thought, the Kingdom of the Father, and the 
phenomenal, half-concealed, half-revealed Other of the 
Kingdom of the Son ; the Other that makes no dif- 
ference in the unsullied light of the divine self-identity 

1 But has Hegel ever made this ' objective existence ' clear ? 

2 Op. at. 11. p. 251, E.t. in. p. 39. 

3 Op. cit. 11. p. 252, E.t. in. p. 40. 



1 68 The Hegelian Unity 

and the Other that refracts and disperses it in endless 
particoloured beams ; God in his eternal essence and 
the world of infinite particularity, of subjective con- 
sciousness and ordinary thought, that is the world 
of experience, the historical realm of ends. 

Now surely in all this we may say that one thing 
at least seems clear : what Hegel undertook to ex- 
plain — the transition from the Kingdom of the Father 
to the Kingdom of the Son — "how this Idea passes 
out of its universality and infinity into finitude " proves 
to be inexplicable. The Kingdom of the Father, then, 
to which the Son as the eternally Only-begotten be- 
longs, is thus — as I attempted to show in the second 
lecture — the undiscovered country from whose bourn 
no traveller returns. The Absolute cannot be the 
startingpoint of real knowledge, — it may be the ulti- 
mate goal of philosophical speculation. Experience 
may lead us to frame the idea of the Absolute, but it 
will not enable us to deduce the world of the Many 
from it. Among the opening sentences of his ex- 
position of the Kingdom of the Son, Hegel has the 
following which comes near to admitting the truth 
of all this : — " First there was the Idea in the element 
of thought : this is the foundation and with it we have 
begun ; [for] the Universal and therefore more abstract 
must precede [all else] in science 1 " ; but in fact "it is 
the later in existence ; it is the potential (das AnsicJi) 
but it comes later to consciousness and knowledge 2 ." 
That is to say the Idea in the element of thought, to 

1 Hegel uses 'science' here in a Fichtean sense, that is as 
equivalent to philosophy. 

2 Op. cit. n. p. 247, E.t. in. p. 33. 



The transition to the Kingdom of the Son 169 

which Hegel has relegated the persons of the Christian 
Trinity, lies behind existence and experience : as he 
goes on immediately to say, "the form of the Idea 
comes to appearance as result, which however is 
essentially potentiality {das Ansich)!' Clear in itself, 
such language is nevertheless not a little confusing in 
view of the context, that we were just now discussing, 
in which it occurs. For there the whole finite world 
of our conscious experience is declared to be illusory, 
inadequate, and untrue, and the movement within the 
realm of thought to be verily reality, truth, infinity. 
But there still, of course, remains the Kingdom of the 
Spirit, in which this estrangement of the Idea, which 
constitutes the inadequacy of the finite world, is finally 
overcome. 

This estrangement is puzzling not only for the 
reasons we have already considered, but also in yet 
another respect. Thus, at the end of the Logic, Hegel 
describes the Idea as impelled to realise itself beyond 
the confines of pure thought and pictures it as freely 
but with absolute self-confidence taking the plunge 
into another sphere. This, as we have seen, is a 
difficult situation to conceive, but the result is equally 
bewildering. For the plunge, when made, has at 
once to be undone : the Idea, dissipated and out of 
itself, has painfully to collect itself again and rise anew 
to its pristine unity. Fortunately it was not let go as 
a whole : it is only the second element or moment, 
that of particularity, that answers to Nature, and the 
externalisation which was the work of the first moment 
is internalised anew through the third. This Kingdom 
of the Spirit we have presently to consider: I anticipate 



170 The Hegelian Unity 

it here because the continuation of the sentence just 
now quoted is somewhat clearer when this is taken 
into account. The whole sentence runs :— " The form 
of the Idea comes to appearance as result, which 
however is essentially potentiality ; as the content of 
the Idea is such that the last is the first and the first 
the last, so is what appears as result, the presupposition, 
the potentiality, the foundation 1 ." This is the cardinal 
principle of Hegel's doctrine of development, to which 
I have already several times referred : the end is the 
beginning, for the beginning is its presupposition, and 
out of this nothing comes but what is already there. 
There is a sense in which this paradox may be true 
and have a meaning : there is a sense in which it is not 
true but self-contradictory. It may be justifiable when 
we are dealing with essence and its explication, with a 
dialectical movement : it is not true of existence and 
of historical evolution. The plausibility — but also the 
falsity — of Hegel's position lay in identifying the two. 
Bare potentiality, the bare idea of an end to be ac- 
complished, however sublime, however completely 
explicated in respect of its essential import, will never 
become actuality. 

But is it so certain, it may be urged, that what 
according to Hegel philosophy places first of all is not 
the supreme reality ? Unquestionably if we could 
suppose that what he meant was simply that — though 
we only gradually attain to a knowledge of God, yet 
when we do — we may believe that God is not merely 
the ratio essendz, but is also the personal creator and 
conserver of all, we should have less difficulty. But 
1 Op. tit 11. p. 247, E.t. in. p. 33. 



HegeFs Doctrine of Developtnent 171 

the whole trend of his system is against sueh an 
interpretation. Now Spirit for Hegel, it will be 
remembered, falls into the triad of subjective, objective 
and absolute Spirit. In keeping with such an inter- 
pretation, then, as Lotze has remarked, " we should 
have expected that absolute spirit... would have re- 
turned,... only with greater depth of meaning and 
perfection, to the form that spirit possessed in the first 
stage of this development, the form that is to say of 
personal, individual Spirit 1 ." But as we are aware, 
Hegel's Absolute Spirit, the counterpart of the Abso- 
lute Idea in the Logic, was something wholly different 
from this. What Hegel places first is then neither 
a single substance nor a single subject. As the latest 
and one of his ablest commentators, Kuno Fischer, 
has said, " the main theme running through the whole 
of his philosophy is the development of the world in 
accordance with reason. What is developed is rational 
consciousness, spirit, the self-knowledge of humanity." 
All actual development of course presupposes its own 
possibility, and it is just this that Hegel places first as 
potential end and aim. He declares thought and being 
to be identical and yet places abstract thought at the 
beginning and then fails to effect its union with actual 
being again. Let me quote another commentary : 
" It may be all very well to declare that the life of 

1 " Of course," Lotze adds, " we could then properly regard the 
whole series of philosophical notions, that were to lead up to this 
climax, not as furnishing a history of the development of God 
himself, but only as the history of our ideas concerning his nature. 
In so far as this interpretation of it is impossible the dialectical 
exposition must be changed." Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie 
seit Kant, 1882, pp. 71 f. 



172 The Hegelian Unity 

God and the divine knowledge is a play of love with 
itself; [but] such an idea sinks to the devotional or 
even to insipidity, if the seriousness, the pain, the 
patience and labour, of the negative are lacking in it. 
In itself that life, it may be, is undisturbed harmony 
and unity with itself, in which there is no concern 
about other-being and its estrangement, and as little 
about overcoming this estrangement. But this [life] 
in itself (dies Ansick) is abstract universality, wherein 
its nature, to be for itself, is ignored." But ' nature/ 
let me parenthetically remark, implies process. This 
commentary is Hegel's own, and occurs in one of the 
very last paragraphs that he revised for the press. 
After another sentence or two he continues : " The 
true is the whole. The whole however is only the 
essence completing itself through its own develop- 
ment. Of the Absolute it is to be said that it is 
essentially result, that not till the end is it what it is 
in truth.... What though the embryo be potentially 
man, it is still not actually so : it is that only as 
matured reason, which has made itself to what it is 
potentially 1 ." The true inwardness of Hegel's paradox 
that the Idea must first make itself to what it is, that 
its end was its aim from the beginning, so that like the 
circle it only completes itself in returning into itself — 
should now be clear. 

The difference between the actual and the potential 
is regarded not as a difference of existence but as what 
Hegel somewhat oddly terms a difference of form. 
Here is an example that he gives : "The man who is 

1 Cf. Phaenomenologie, pp. 15 — 17. Prof. Baillie's translation 
1. pp. 16 ff. 



— 







The Potential and the Actual 173 

potentially rational has advanced no further when he is 
actually rational. The potentiality {das Ansick) is 
conserved and yet the difference is quite enormous. No 
new content has emerged, yet the form is an enormous 
difference. On this difference all the difference in the 
world's history turns 1 ." This reminds us of his former 
allegory of the house : it is as if one said, the house 
and the plan of it are logically the same. When we 
have both we have a difference of form, or what he calls 
a duplication : we have the plan and the plan out of 
itself. But suppose the house became self-conscious : 
it would, Hegel assumes, in that case recognise the 
identity between itself and its plan : the duplication 
would yield to identity, and the end coincide with the 
beginning. Yes, logically or ideally perhaps ; but still 
there is ' the enormous difference.' A conjuror throws 
up a picture and it comes down a watch : how are we 
going to account for that, especially how, if we have 
no conjuror ? But in truth it turns out that it is after 
all not a plan, a picture or an idea with which we 
begin, but a germ and an impulse. " The potentiality 
determines the course of the development" — so we 
say after the event — but it does not provide the 
motive. There is besides an impulse towards self- 
development, something "that cannot endure to be 
only potential " : this is ' the germ ' that is thus already 
partly actual. "The impulse," says Hegel, "is the 
contradiction, that it [the germ] is only potential and 
yet ought not to be so. The impulse puts forth into 
existence 2 ." This is the point where Hegel essays to 
ford his ditch : the impulse in historical development 
1 Geschichte der Philosophies 1833, L P* 34- 2 And* P- 35- 



1 74 The Hegelian Unity 

and the contradiction in dialectical development are 
identified; and the former, as temporal and phenomenal, 
is, .as much as may be, suppressed. 

To recognise this ' monstrous' va-repov Trporepov, 
as Schopenhauer called it, of Hegel's panlogism is to 
recognise that in his zeal for thoroughness he over- 
reached himself. In order to make doubly sure of 
his foundation, and start without presuppositions he 
sundered what he could not afterwards unite. The 
unity which he places at the beginning, so far from 
being suppositionless, is but ' the shadow ' of the unity 
that by means of the historical method he reaches in 
the end — the slowly and painfully achieved unity that 
rests on plurality. The so-called transition to the 
Kingdom of the Son, from the Idea to Nature, turns 
out to be no veritable transition at all, to be not the 
spiritual in alienation from itself, but the spiritual at 
the outset of its development. The Kingdom of the 
Spirit is not the return of finite spirits to the eternal 
Father from whom they have wandered nor to the 
universal source whence they emanated : it is simply 
the advance of humanity towards an absolute conscious- 
ness of its own unity. Passages in support of this 
assertion might be quoted from all parts of Hegel's 
works. Here are some : " The consciousness of finite 
spirit is concrete being, the material for the realisation 
of the notion of God 1 ." Again, " In the higher specu- 
lative consideration it (Spirit) is the absolute Spirit 
itself, which in order to be for itself the knowledge 
of itself, differentiates itself in itself, and thereby posits 
the finiteness of spirit, within which it becomes the 
1 Philosophie der Religion, 2te Auf. n. p. 551, E.t. 111. p. 365. 



The Kingdom of the Spirit 1 75 

absolute object of the knowledge of itself. Thus it is 
the absolute Spirit in its community (or church), — the 
actual Absolute as Spirit and knowledge of itself 1 ." 
Again, " God is God only in so far as He knows 
himself: his self-knowledge is, further, his self- 
consciousness in man, and man's knowledge of God 
which proceeds to man's self-knowledge in God 2 /' 
Once more, contrasting religious faith with historical 
evidence, he says of the former: "This rather than that 
is the rise of the community, is the community itself, 
the existing Spirit, the Spirit in its existence, God 
existing as community." And a sentence or two later 
on, in referring to the three persons of the Trinity : — 
" The first was the Idea in its simple universality for 
itself. ...The second was the Idea in its externality, so 
that the external phenomenon is brought back to the 
first, is known as divine Idea — the identity of the 
human and divine. The third is this consciousness, 
God as Spirit, and this Spirit as existing in the 
community*." Finally, "God is infinite, Ego finite: 
these are false, objectionable expressions, forms that 
are inappropriate to the Idea, to the nature of the 
fact.... God is the movement to the finite... in the Ego, 
as that which is annulling itself as finite, God returns 
to himself, and only as this return is He God. With- 
out the world God is not God 4 ." The full significance 
of these and many more passages of like import 5 only 

1 JEsthetik, 1. p. 122. 2 Philosophy of Mi?2d, Encycl. in. § 564. 

3 Philosophic der Religion, iste Auf., 1832, 11. p. 261. 

4 Op. cit. 2te Auf. 1. p. 194, Eng. trans. 1. p. 200. 

5 Several of which will be found in Drews' Deutsche Speculation 
u.s.iv., vol. 1. pp. 260 ff. and in McTaggart's Studies in the Hegelian 
Co sinology, pp. 208 ff. 



176 The Hegelian Unity 

becomes apparent when we remember that, according 
to Hegel, God before this realisation in the finite, this 
existence as the community, this self- consciousness in 
man, this return to Himself, is only this very result 
ideally regarded as its own presupposition. God comes 
to consciousness only in humanity, and otherwise is 
not God, not Spirit, but only Idea. But an Idea is 
not conscious, though it implies consciousness : hence 
God as Idea is either the unconscious, as Schopenhauer 
and von Hartmann maintained, or an abstract essence 
that 'comes later to existence,' as Hegel himself by 
turns concedes and denies as he alternates between 
the historical and the dialectical. 

But much more impressive than any string of 
quotations is the whole drift of Hegel's Philosophy 
of Religion and especially of the long section devoted 
to the so-called Kingdom of the Spirit. In the latter 
referring to the divinity of Christ he says it is " clear 

that the Community of itself produces this faith 

Whereas grateful peoples have placed their bene- 
factors only among the stars, the Spirit has recognised 
subjectivity as an absolute moment of the divine 
nature. The person of Christ has been decreed by 
the Church to be the Son of God 1 ." Miracles, the 
words of the Bible, Councils and such like have no- 
thing to do with it. " The true Christian content 
of faith is to be justified by philosophy, not by history." 
Not by history as ordinarily understood Hegel means, 
but taking the philosophy of history in its widest 
sense, then by that and nothing else. It is all 'divine 
history,' ' development in conformity with reason,' 
1 Op, cit. 11. p. 328, Eng. trans, in. p. 121. 



The 'Phenomenology of Spirit' 177 

Hegel affirms. Yes, but chequered and distorted by 
contingency to an indefinite extent, emerging gradually 
out of superstition and phantasy, out of sorrow and 
disappointment. " The sorrow of the world," he has 
said, "was the birth-place of the impulse of Spirit to 
know God as spiritual in universal form and stript 
of finitude. This want was begotten through the 
progress of history and the development of the world- 
spirit." Hercules was deified by the Greeks, the 
Roman Emperor was revered as God ; and Christ 
was decreed to be the Son of God only by the same 
effort of Spirit as that which lies at the basis of those 
earlier forms and can be recognised as present in them. 
"Out of the ferment of finitude as it changes into foam 
Spirit exhales its fragrance 1 ." 

When we pass from Hegel's Philosophy of Religion 
to the Phenomenology of Spirit we find there a record 
of the same gradual process and the same ultimate 
result — an account which runs closely on all fours with 
that which the pluralist would give. It starts with 
mere sentient experience, which advances towards 
self-consciousness, as the subject, in shaping and con- 
trolling its environment, realises its own independence 
as an agent. Finally it reaches the stage of reason, as 
such incipiently self-conscious agents enter into social 
relations and become fully self-conscious ; then too 
they develop a system of law and order and also 
begin to realise the spiritual world of art, religion and 
philosophy. I know of no better summary of this 
wonderful but terribly intricate work than the follow- 
ing given by Windelband in his History of Modern 
1 Op. cit. 2nd ed. n. p. 330, Eng. trans. III. 124. 

w. 12 



178 The Hegelian Unity 

Philosophy: — "Hegel's aim is to... build up the whole of 
philosophy out of the continuity shewn in the historical 
development of the human mind. Man's self-conscious- 
ness is the world-spirit that has come to itself. The 
evolution of the human mind is the conscious self- 
apprehension of the world-mind, and the essence of 
things is to be understood from the process which the 
human mind has passed through in order to grasp its 
own organization and thereby the organization of the 
universe itself. The Hegelian philosophy regards itself 
as the self-consciousness of the entire development of 
the culture attained by the reason of the human race, 
and in this it sees at the same time the self-conscious- 
ness of the Absolute Spirit as it unfolds itself in the 
world. Thus this philosophy becomes on the one 
side a thoroughly historical view of the world ( Welt- 
anschauung) but on the other lapses over into a 
completely anthropocentric speculation about the world 
(Weltbetrachtung)> that is to say, it looks upon the 
development of the human spirit as the development 
of the 'world-spirit' 1 ." 

In the light of this summary the famous sentences 
with which Hegel concludes his Phenomenology become 
more or less clear: — "The way to the goal, absolute 
knowledge, or spirit knowing itself as spirit, lies in the 
memory of minds " — the solidarity of heredity and 
tradition, I suppose we might say — "as they are in them- 
selves and as they accomplish the organization of their 
realm. Their conservation on the side of their free 
existence manifesting itself in the form of contingency is 
History, but on the side of their organization in notional 
1 Geschichte der neueren Philosophies 4te Aufl. 1907, 11. p. 329. 



The ' History of Philosophy ' 1 79 

form (begriffenen) it is Science manifesting itself as 
knowledge. Both together, history in notional form, 
constitute the memory and the Golgotha of the Absolute 
Spirit, the actuality, truth and certainty of his throne, 
without which he would be the lifeless Solitary ; only 

'From the chalice of this spirit realm 
Sparkles his Infinitude' 1 ." 

The reference to Calvary recalls the negative 
element, the sorrow of the world that spiritualises it, on 
which Hegel had previously dwelt. With this we may 
compare a similar passage giving the ' result ' of the 
History of Philosophy : — " The struggle of the finite 
self-consciousness with the absolute self-consciousness, 
which appeared for that to be beyond it, ceases. 
[For] the finite self-consciousness has ceased to be 
finite ; and thereby on the other hand the absolute 
self-consciousness has acquired the actuality, which 
it previously lacked. In general the entire history 
of the world so far, and in particular the history of 
philosophy, is simply the exhibition of this struggle. 
And now they seem to have reached their goal, where 
the absolute self-consciousness, of which they had 
a presentation ( Vorstelhmg), has ceased to be some- 
thing foreign, where, that is to say, the spirit as spirit 

is actual The Spirit produces itself as Nature, [and] 

as Society (Staat). The former is its unconscious 
action,... in the deeds and life of history as also [in the 
works] of art it brings itself forth consciously,... but 
only in science" — i.e. in philosophy — "does it know 
itself as absolute spirit, and this knowledge alone is 
spirit, is its veritable existence 2 ." 

1 An inaccurate quotation from Schiller's poem Die Freundschaft. 

2 Geschichte der Philosophic, in. pp. 689 f. 

12 — 2 



180 The Hegelian Unity 

Everywhere, then, in all his works, Hegel reaches 
unity as the result of a development, and everywhere 
emphatically declares it to be a result. Surely there- 
fore it is reasonable to believe that he means what he 
says. When, however, he adds that this result is itself 
the beginning, he does not say what he means. What 
he means is itself result — the speculative inversion of 
the concrete development in the mirror of the so-called 
Logic : he himself compares it to standing on your 
head 1 . Even the Absolute Idea itself is so far a result 
that the notion of it is described as ' an object in which 
all differentiations have coalesced 2 .' As to the actual 
unity that is its correlative — in spite of occasional 
passages in which Hegel refers to it as 'having 
personality,' it can hardly be called a person in the 
strict sense. This, I think, is evident from Hegel's 
account of the State or Society. Much the same 
language as he used in describing the religious com- 
munity is repeated here. The state is "the ethical 
spirit, the substantial will that thinks itself and knows 
and what it knows accomplishes"; "it is the spirit 
that is stationed in the world and there consciously 
realises itself, whereas in Nature it is only actualised 
as its own Other, as sleeping spirit." He even calls 
the idea of the state 'the actual God 3 .' But we have 
still to see how far Hegel's actual unity is from de- 
serving the title Absolute ; and this will bring us 
round again to Pluralism, in which there is the same 
shortcoming. 

1 Phaenomenoiogie, p. 21 ; E. t. p. 24. 2 E?icyclopaedie, § 236. 

8 Philosophic des Pechtes, iste Aufl. § 257, pp. 312, 318, 320. 



LECTURE IX. 



THE LIMITS OF PLURALISM. 



What after all, we have now to ask, was Hegel's 
actual unity ? It was entirely geocentric and anthro- 
pocentric. The earth, he says, is the truth of the 
solar system, just as animal nature is the truth of 
vegetable, and this the truth of the mineral. The 
earth is the planet : the sun has neither produced it 
nor thrown it off; but sun, moon, comets, and stars are 
only conditions for the earth (Bedingungen der Erde) 
which they serve. Among the continents of the earth, 
Europe, in virtue of its physical characteristics, forms 
its consciousness, its rational part, and the centre of 
Europe is Germany 1 . With his own philosophy, he 
had the sublime assurance to think, the history of 
philosophy closes ; and in the restoration of Prussia 
under Stein he thought the culmination of the world's 
history was attained. It is however not so much this 
unique anticlimax that now concerns us ; but rather 
the general position that there are not ' more worlds 
than ours,' which Hegel shared with the fifteenth 
century ecclesiastics. They, it will be remembered, 
had burned Giordano Bruno alive, who was one of the 
first in modern times to proclaim this doctrine ; and 
1 Encyclopaedic, §§ 249, 280, 340. 



1 82 The Limits of Pluralism 

they regarded even Columbus as verging on heresy. 
"As the planet, the earth is the body of individual 
totality... its characteristic as organic is to digest the 
entirely general astral powers, which as heavenly 
bodies have the illusory appearance of independence, 
and to bring them under the control of its individuality, 

in which these Titanic members sink to moments 

From a quantitative standpoint one may regard the 
earth as 'a drop in the sea of the infinite,' but magnitude 
is a very external determination." The earth " is our 
home, not as physical, but as the home of spirit 1 ." 

This seems to be about all that Hegel had to say 
concerning the existence of a plurality of worlds. He 
appears never to have thought seriously of controverting 
it : it was too completely beyond his purview for that. 
The question : — To what end then all the rest of the 
universe ? which vexed the soul of old Bohme — why, 
Hoffding asks, did it never trouble Hegel ? His 
contempt for Nature was too extreme, we reply : the 
man who compared the starry heavens to a Might-rash' 
or ' a swarm of flies ' was hardly likely to have troubled 
his head further about them. Had he done so, facing 
the facts with an open mind and without parti pris, he 
would have found the realisation of the Absolute Idea 
as the Kingdom of the Spirit a far more serious 
problem than from his purely geocentric and anthropo- 
centric standpoint it proved to be. It would have 
been impossible then to call the earth ' the home of 
spirit' par excellence. Now this is precisely the 
problem with which pluralism is on one side confronted. 
So far as our experience goes we seem unable to 
1 Op. tit. § 280. 



The Plurality of Worlds 183 

conceive how a plurality of worlds can ever become 
a single Realm of Ends, such as might fitly be called 
absolute. 

But the plurality of worlds seems not only to stand 
in the way of that complete consummation of the will 
towards a higher unity, which is the pluralisms ideal : 
it also presents difficulties for the Christian theologian, 
The continuity between natural and moral evil is so 
close that it can hardly be seriously maintained that 
the advance from a state of merely animal innocence 
to a i knowledge of good and evil ' has not frequently, 
perhaps invariably, entailed actual sin and error and 
misery. If so, then for other worlds as for ours, what 
Hegel has called a ' Golgotha' would be essential; and 
thus, if we are not to charge God with the arbitrary 
partiality of an oriental potentate, we seem driven to 
assume that ' the plan of salvation,' the divine progress 
from the manger to the cross, has been reenacted in 
worlds innumerable. Sir David Brewster apparently 
was prepared, if need be, to assume this; but theologians, 
so far as I know, have been less presumptuous. 
Two other alternatives then present themselves. The 
existence of a plurality of worlds might be simply 
denied, as it was by John Wesley, by Whewell — in 
his famous anonymous essay — and as it has been 
denied again recently by Dr Alfred Russel Wallace. 
Both these later writers rely mainly on a use of the 
argument from probabilities, which seems clearly fal- 
lacious. If a given effect can only result from the 
cooperation of a single group of independent causes 
we may proceed to inquire about the probability of 
their concurrence elsewhere ; but if the given effect 



184 The Limits of Pluralism 

can result in manifold other ways, then the absence of 
all the conditions present in a given case proves 
nothing. It may be true that a fauna and a flora 
analogous to ours are possible nowhere else, that human 
beings could only exist on this one planet. But 
metabolism, stimulation, and spontaneous direction 
may be possible in a protoplasm very different from that 
with which we are familiar, and evolution might progress 
indefinitely on quite other lines than those that have 
obtained for us 1 . Viewed from such more general 
standpoint the probability is not against, but enor- 
mously in favour of, a plurality of worlds, as men of 
science almost unanimously allow. We come then to 
the other alternative. 

Granted that in the one universe there are many 
worlds, the Christian theologian has the strongest 
grounds for believing that they are spiritually and 
historically, and not merely physically, interconnected. 
It was 'the infidel Tom Paine,' a quondam Quaker, 
who first made the plurality of worlds a serious 
stumbling-block for Christian believers by his once 
famous work, the Age of Reason. To meet his ob- 
jections without denying his premises, Andrew Fuller 
and afterwards Chalmers — mainly on the strength of 
isolated texts from the Old and the New Testament — 
sought to establish " the position," as the latter puts 
it, " that the history of our redemption is known in 
other and distant places of creation, and is matter of 
deep interest and feeling amongst other orders of 

1 The protoplasm of our planet has determined once for all the 
possible foods and the possible senses of all its organisms ; but quite 
other protoplasms are perfectly conceivable. 



The Upper Limit of Pluralism 185 

created intelligences 1 ." The nature of such a connexion 
is the problem that pluralism in our day has to consider. 
We may call it the upper limit of pluralism. 

It seems obvious that unless some supreme spiritual 
unity is found the universe will remain in the highest 
sense an absolute plurality, if such a term is allowable. 
Such a universe would be a merely sporadic manifold 
of realms of ends having a common physical basis but 
devoid of all teleological continuity ; like so many 
village communities without a supreme federation, 
geographically neighbours but strangers politically. 
As society lifts the individual to a higher level, so we 
feel that a supreme unity would increase the worth of 
this universe both intellectually and morally. Such 
a unity is an ideal that we feel ought to be real. Can 
we conceive it more definitely or find any evidence of 
its existence ? The theological writers — as the words 
just quoted from Chalmers show — rely on the Christian 
doctrine of a hierarchy of angels to render the con- 
nexion of a multitude of otherwise isolated worlds 
intelligible. Angels are to be regarded not only as the 
ministers of Providence but as spectators of universal 
history. Such a conception is entirely in keeping with 
the general standpoint of pluralism, as I have tried to 
describe it. The principle of continuity indeed almost 
forces us to posit higher orders of intelligence than our 
own ; and the fact 2 that we are able to control and 
modify the course of evolution suggests that if there 
are higher intelligences they can exercise this power 
in a still higher degree. 

1 Christian Revelation in connexion with Astronomy, Disc. iv. 
1st edn, p. 145. 

2 Cf. Lecture v. p. in. 



1 86 The Limits of Pluralism 

This latter possible function of intelligences of a 
higher order does not directly concern our main 
problem, that of an ultimate and supreme unity ; but 
it bears on it indirectly, in so far as any evidence of 
such control would be evidence of the existence of 
those superior beings ; and their existence again would 
strengthen the assumption of a still higher unity in the 
plurality of worlds. Is there then we may inquire any 
evidence of this sort? Evidence, I mean, of a purely 
objective and scientific kind, not merely evidence 
which could satisfy only persons with certain sub- 
jective convictions lying outside the purview of science 
proper. For on the lines of our present inquiry it might 
be held that we cannot fairly appeal, for example, 
to the specially Christian evidences in support of 
theophanies, incarnation, inspiration and the like. At 
the same time it should not be forgotten that spiritual- 
istic pluralism, unlike naturalism, can have no a priori 
objection to the 'supernatural' in this sense 1 . 

We have an instance of the sort of evidence we are 
seeking in Dr Russel Wallace's arguments, already 

1 These remarks will of course suggest to everybody a topic 
which is in fact fundamental to the whole subject we are considering — 
the question, namely, of religious faith and religious experience. 
Such an experience implies a consciousness of the presence of 
a higher spiritual being — a consciousness which is wholly distinct 
from the belief in other selves which we reach by the ejective 
interpretation of what is externally presented. It is in such wise 
that to earnestly religious minds 'the evidence of things unseen' 
is certain, immediate and practically verified. For them the problem 
of the unity of the many is already essentially solved. But their 
certainty after all is primarily subjective : it is faith, not knowledge. 
It cannot compel assent on purely scientific or merely speculative 
grounds. Hence I think we do well to follow Kant's example and 
for the present to leave it aside. 



- 



Dr Russel Wallace's Arguments 187 

noted in an earlier lecture, to show that man's appear- 
ance on the earth is due to such supernatural interference. 
After enumerating a number of human characteristics, 
such as naked skin, a brain largely in excess of animal 
needs, musical voice, moral sense, etc., he proceeds : — 
"The inference I would draw from this class of 
phenomena is, that a superior intelligence has guided 
the development of man in a definite direction, and 
for a special purpose, just as man guides the develop- 
ment of many animal and vegetable forms. The 
laws of evolution alone would, perhaps, never have 
produced a grain so well adapted to man's use as 
wheat and maize ; such fruits as the seedless banana 
and bread-fruit; or such animals as the Guernsey milch 
cow, or the London dray-horse. Yet these so closely 
resemble the unaided productions of nature, that we 
may well imagine a being who had mastered the laws 
of development of organic forms through past ages, 
refusing to believe that any new power had been 
concerned in their production, and scornfully rejecting 
the theory... that in these few cases a controlling in- 
telligence had directed the action of the laws of 
variation, multiplication, and survival for its own 
purposes. We know, however, that this has been 
done ; and we must therefore admit the possibility that, 
if we are not the highest intelligences in the universe, 
some higher intelligence may have directed the process 
by which the human race was developed, by means 
of more subtle agencies than we are acquainted with." 
In a note he adds: — "Angels and archangels... have 
been so long banished from our belief as to have 
become actually unthinkable as actual existences, and 



1 88 The Limits of Pluralism 

nothing in modern philosophy takes their place. Yet 
the grand law of ' continuity,' the last outcome of 
modern science... cannot surely fail to be true beyond 
the narrow sphere of our vision, and leave such an 
infinite chasm between man and the great Mind of the 
universe. Such a supposition seems... in the highest 
degree improbable 1 ." As I have already said 2 there 
is no denying the formal soundness of this reasoning, 
even if we hesitate to go further. It at least serves to 
set the continuity argument in a telling light. 

A similar, if less impressive argument is perhaps 
to be found in the prodigality in nature of beautiful 
colours and forms, which natural selection on grounds 
of bare utility seems altogether unable to explain. 
Take for example the gorgeous coloration of humming- 
birds or the so-called ' ball and socket ' ornament in 
the secondary wing-feathers of the Argus pheasant 3 . 
In reply to the late Duke of Argyll 4 , one of the few 
writers who have dwelt at any length on this particular 
'mystery of creation,' Darwin admitted that natural 
selection was powerless to account for such facts, but 
he thought that sexual selection would suffice. Dr 
Wallace, who at first agreed with him in this, has since 
recanted ; and now, I take it, he would agree rather 
with the Duke of Argyll that " love of beauty is equally 

1 Natural Selection and Tropical Nature, 1891, pp. 204 f. 

2 Cf. Lect. iv. p. 91. 

3 Of Tennyson his friend Edward Fitzgerald relates that "picking 
up a daisy as we walked and looking close to its crimson-tipt leaves 
he said: 'Does not this look like a thinking Artificer, one who wishes 
to ornament?'" In Memoriam, A. W. Robinson's excellent edition, 

P- 2 55- 

4 Reign of Law, 1st edn, p. 236. 



The Aesthetical in Nature 189 

a purpose which we see fulfilled in Nature," and so 
implies some superior control. At any rate he con- 
cludes his chapter on the colour-sense by saying: — 
" The emotions excited by colour and by music alike 
seem to rise above the level of a world developed on 
purely utilitarian principles 1 ." This whole subject of 
what we might call Natural Aesthetics seems to be 
a fruitful field of inquiry that, so far as I know, has 
been strangely neglected 2 . The subject no doubt is 
beset with difficulties, and there are many pros and 
cons to weigh before the intervention of such superior 
and disinterested principles can be maintained with 
any confidence. Still, if their presence were credibly 
ascertained it would add greatly to the antecedent 
probability that, to repeat Dr Wallace's words, " the 
grand law of continuity cannot fail to be true beyond 
the narrow sphere of our vision." 

This ' grand law ' then encourages the pluralist to 
assume, though lacking sufficient direct evidence, that 
there exist individuals of a higher order, or rather a 
hierarchy of such orders — a speculative view with 
which Leibniz and Fechner have made us all familiar. 
But human beings owe their pre-eminence on this 
planet to social organization, which we regard as 
not merely an aggregate but as an over-individual 
unity. The law of continuity then would seem to 
suggest that individuals of a higher order in like manner 
are organized into over-individual unities, and so on — 
possibly ad indefinitum. This view would thus lead 

1 Op. at. p. 415. 

2 August Pauly is an exception. Cf. his Darwinismus unci 
Lamarckismus, 1905, pp. 272 ff. 



190 The Limits of Pluralism 

up to a society rather than to a person as the Supreme 
Unity of all. But apart from other difficulties that we 
shall have presently to consider — it might readily be 
brought into line with the Christian doctrine of a 
tri-personal God. The objections that have recently 
been brought against theism by Dr McTaggart — from 
the standpoint of what may fairly be called a Hegelian 
pluralism — might perhaps in this way be met. It is 
noteworthy that it is the theologians who have been 
most influenced by Hegel, who insist the most on 
what is technically called the ' essential trinity ' (rpoiros 
vjrdpgecos) of the divine nature in opposition to the 
Sabellian heresy of an ' undifferentiated unity,' which 
only assumed a triple form in its revelation to 
mankind, a so-called ' economic trinity ' (rpoiros airo- 
KdXvxpecos). Thus Martensen in his Christian Dogmatics 
writes : — "Without the Son the Father could not speak 
of himself as I, for the first-personal form, apart from 
an objectivity distinct from the Ego (a not- 1, a Thou), 
is unthinkable." "When then," he remarks, "we 
teach with the Church the eternal preexistence and 
independence of creation not only of the Father but 
also of the Son and the Spirit, we thereby affirm that 
God, in order to be the self-revealing, self-loving God, 
must eternally differentiate himself into I and Thou, 
and just as eternally unite himself with himself as 
the Spirit of love that proceeds from the relation of 
contrast 1 ." At the same time there is no logical in- 
compatibility between pluralism and the assumption of 
a single personality as the Supreme Spirit of the world. 
In fact Leibniz refers to God in this wise as la monade 
1 Christ liche Dogmatik, §§ 56, 55. 



The 'Supreme' 191 

primitive, a phrase which is precisely equivalent to the 
Monas monadum, which Giordano Bruno and others 
had previously used. 

But as I have already observed 1 , such supreme 
unity, whether triune or not, could from the pluralistic 
standpoint be regarded only as supreme, only as prima 
inter pares, not as absolute. A supreme monad or 
society, that is to say, would necessarily imply a 
certain relativity and limitation consequent on the 
existence of other monads and societies also possessing 
some spontaneity and initiative. For a strict and 
absolute pluralism moreover such limitation would not 
be self-imposed ; not an act of will on the part of one 
supreme being but an actual characteristic of the 
nature of things, of the absolute whole consisting of 
such Supreme and the rest of the world. The ordinary 
notion of creation — viz. that at a given moment there 
was no world and at a subsequent moment the world 
was there — is rejected as having no sort of analogy 
with experience, and as therefore unthinkable. On 
the other hand the notion of creation as eternal and 
continuous seems to involve an essential implication of 
God and the world — limitation on the one side, de- 
pendence on the other. But these relations hold good 
also of the finite spirit. The world is the object of 
my experience : in Leibnizian language it is mirrored 
in my experience from that unique standpoint which 
makes me what I am as regards capacity and oppor- 
tunity. The world limits me in manifold ways, but it 
is also dependent upon me. For I am not wholly 
passive and inert : I am able to react upon it and do 
1 Cf. Lecture n. p. 29. 



192 The Limits of Pluralism 

in fact in some measure modify it : apart from me it 
would not be all in all just what it is. On the strength 
of the principle of continuity then the pluralist would 
assume the like to hold good of the highest. The 
world is the object of God's experience, God is the 
subject that has this experience, not the abstract totality 
in which the distinction of subject and object disappears. 
Like every other spirit God must have his unique 
standpoint ; but it is unique in a quite special way : it 
is the highest. 

But if now, as theism commonly does, we regard 
this highest as infinitely transcending ourselves, we 
should be prepared to find such difference of degree 
really amounting to a difference of kind. Take, for 
example, a circle : its circumference, a curved line, 
meets a diameter, a straight line, at two equidistant 
points and bears to this the ratio commonly represented 
by the Greek letter ir. If however we let the diameter 
become infinite, the circumference ceases to be curved ; 
and if now, from one extremity of the diameter we 
imagine three bodies travelling, one along the diameter 
itself and the two others in opposite directions along 
the circumference to its other extremity ; then the 
further they go the further they will be apart, although, 
if we are dealing with a circle, we must also imagine 
all three eventually meeting. But in truth we are no 
longer dealing with a circle but with something generic- 
ally distinct, that is to say with the limit towards 
which we approach — but which we never attain — 
when the diameter of the circle increases indefinitely. 
We regard the circle as a closed figure, but in passing 
to the limit in this wise we leave definite enclosure 



Theism and Pluralism 193 

behind us. Now what we have to note is that whereas 
the theist passes beyond the series, the pluralist remains 
within it. Both may recognise a Supreme Being 
surpassing all our powers of conception ; but for the 
theist the superlative is absolute and transcendent, for 
the pluralist it is relative and immanent. When the 
theist says that man is made in the image of God and 
then proceeds to describe God as infinite and absolute, 
it needs but a very slight acquaintance with the meaning 
of these attributes to realise that both statements 
cannot be literally true. For the pluralist on the 
other hand, if there be a Supreme Spirit at all, as he 
may reasonably suppose, that Spirit is still genuinely 
a member of the realm of ends, albeit the highest and, 
so to say, the central member 1 . 

But there is still a further mark of relativity clinging 
to any ideal of the Supreme Spirit that pluralism can 
entertain, which must ever distinguish this ideal within 
the realm of spirits from the unconditional Absolute 
.of so-called philosophical theism. For the standpoint 
of the pluralist is historical : he contemplates the world 
exclusively as a world of life and experience and 

1 As such there must be attributed to Him powers and capacities 
that would not be adequately represented if we attempted to combine 
and magnify indefinitely the powers and capacities of the most 
exalted human beings ; just as, for example, our human nature would 
not be adequately represented if we imagined the social ascidian, one 
of the earliest progenitors that the zoologist assigns to us, picturing 
a human being as a sort of social ascidian in excelsis. In particular 
it would, I think, be reasonable to suppose, as I have already 
remarked, that mutual communication between this Supreme Spirit 
and ourselves — and even between other superior beings and ourselves — 
would be possible of a more immediate, so to say more internal nature, 
than that which alone holds between ourselves and our fellow men. 
w. 13 



194 The Limits of Pluralism 

therefore of process and change or, as we are wont to 
say, under the form of time not under that of eternity 1 . 
As immanent in this world God must, it would seem, so 
far be conceived as subject to its fundamental conditions. 
Conformably with what I said just now, we may 
suppose his time-span to exceed ours indefinitely, we 
may credit him with thoughts that are intuitive and 
adequate where ours are only discursive and symbolic : 
he may know all truth sub specie aeternatis. But all 
this is hardly life. As the World Spirit par excellence, 
interested and active throughout the universe, how 
can he be a living God wholly apart from the world's 
evolution and history ? Even if philosophical specula- 
tion after many vain attempts should at length succeed 
in explaining time as in some way ' the moving image 
of eternity,' as Plato poetically expressed it, still this 
would not alter the case. Mutatis mutandis, unless 
the world of experience were reduced to an impossible 
illusion, the relations temporally prefigured would still 
remain and have a meaning. A Supreme Spirit 
confronted and conditioned by free agents certainly 
does not correspond to the notion usually entertained 
of the Deity. Such a ' finite God ' many would disown 
as a manifest contradiction in terms ; yet beyond this 
it does not seem possible for the pluralist to go. It is 
however a sign of the times that there are not a few 
theologians who have been led by the problem of 
freedom and the problem of evil to entertain the 
pluralistic conception. Later on we shall have, of 
course, to consider the question further in connexion 
with these problems 2 . But so much for the present 
1 But see Supplementary Note iv. ' 2 Cf. Lectures xin. — xvn. 



The Lower Limit of Pluralism 195 

concerning what I have called the upper limit of 
pluralism. Let us now turn to what in contrast we 
may term the lower limit. 

Resuming our example of a circle or sphere : just 
as when the radius becomes infinite we have no longer 
a figure occupying space, but simply the whole of space 
itself; so when the radius is zero we have a figure no 
more, but simply a point in space which has position 
but neither parts nor magnitude. As the principle of 
continuity will not carry us to a transcendent upper 
limit, neither will it carry us to a transcendent lower 
one. The naked, slumbering monads of Leibniz, the 
monads whose so-called perception is absolutely con- 
fused or undifferentiated, are as much an abstract ideal 
as the mass-points of the physicist. Body without 
extension and a subject without consciousness are 
limiting concepts, not known realities within experience. 
If we attempt to trace the evolution of the world back 
to such an ideal beginning, as Spencer for example 
did, what becomes of our Many ? Though eventually 
some are dominant over others, still — if evolution is to 
be thorough-going and complete — can we suppose that 
they begin by dominating ? But if all are at first 
unconscious and slumbering, how is the awakening to 
begin ? If all mirrored the same universe in the same 
as yet absolutely undifferentiated fashion, all would be 
so far homogeneous ; and according to the principle of 
the identity of indiscernibles, which Leibniz himself 
had formulated, all would be one, all would have the 
same content which effectively would be no content ; 
and there would thus be no ground for change and as 
little possibility of it. So then it would seem that as 

13—2 



196 The Limits of Pluralism 

the unattainable upper limit of pluralism points towards 
an absolute and unconditioned Being transcending the 
Many, so the unattainable lower limit points towards 
an indeterminate Being, an aireipov, that affords no 
ground for the discrimination of individuals at all. 

Again we may proceed in a different way only to 
reach a similar result. The goal of the pluralistic world 
at any stage in its progress is, we say, higher unity 
between its constituent monads and systems of monads 
— advance in organization both individual and social. 
We have left it for the present an open question 
whether the highest term is strictly an individual or 
an over-individual, a person or a society of persons. 
But the lowest can only consist of individuals ; unless 
indeed anyone should think it worth while to call the 
primitive Many a society in the loosest sense, on the 
ground that it is in some sort a unity. When we 
advance to an organism as a complex of individuals or 
monads we assume the presence of a dominant monad, 
or what Leibniz called a soul. Its dominance must be 
regarded as due in part at least to its innate or essential 
Superiority, not solely to the accident of its position : 
such absolute tychism could not conceivably be made 
to work. But if evolution as a historical process is to 
be thorough-going there must be a stage at which this 
dominance is not yet realised but remains so to say 
■ potential/ awaiting the fulfilment of its complementary 
conditions. Agamemnon and the men he was to lead 
were all much on a par as infants together in their 
cradles. And the fact that as evolution advances 
diversity increases suggests that all the differences 
that eventually emerge were originally latent. Such 



The demand for a Primum movens 197 

absolute origin as the lower limit of evolution is as 
much beyond all experience as the absolute beginning 
of his own life is beyond the conscious experience of 
any individual among us. Such antitheses as nature 
and origin, form and matter, are for us always but 
relative. 

Either way then if we attempt to regress to the 
lower limit we seem only to reach the illegitimate 
notion of pure potentiality ; there is no natura naturata, 
and in order that the process, the nasci, may begin we 
seem to require a Primum inovens that is not one of 
the nascent Many. Otherwise the nearer we approach 
to the beginning the more inconceivable the beginning 
becomes. We are thus led to regard our two limits as 
really related, as they are in the cosmogonies of Plato 
and Aristotle for example ; that is to say, we are led 
to regard God as quickening the bare potentiality of 
a world into actual motion and life. We approximate 
too to the theism of Leibniz, who was likewise driven 
beyond the limits of his monadology proper. Not as 
Monas monadum, but as transcending all monads, God 
according to Leibniz as ' infinite intellect ' contemplates 
the absolute totality of possible worlds and gives reality 
to that which his goodness has selected as the best. 

In truth however all this rests, it is urged, on an 
outside, not an inside, view of the pluralistic position. 
The philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, which have 
determined the main trend of all subsequent speculation 
till comparatively recent times, shew a marked bias 
towards what is nowadays called Intellectualism. Ac- 
cording to this, cognition is the primary factor in 
experience and pure contemplation the most perfect 



198 The Limits of Pluralism 

state. Even for Leibniz activity was dependent on 
perception in such wise that confused perception and 
complete passivity were synonymous. 

What is called Voluntarism however inverts all 
this. Conation, not cognition, is regarded as funda- 
mental to life : it is the blind impulse to live that leads 
on to knowledge, just as it is for the sake of life that 
knowledge is valued ; not vice versa. This doctrine of 
the primacy of the practical first definitely announced 
by Kant, repeated and extended by Fichte, was still 
more emphatically proclaimed by Schopenhauer, the 
very title of whose chief work, Die Welt als Wille 
una 1 als Vorstellung, is but the complete formulation of 
the doctrine already adumbrated by Kant. The things 
per se in the world are will, the things we know are but 
their appearance. For voluntarism an ' unconscious ' 
world would not be either a dead material world or the 
bare potentiality of a living world only to be made 
actual by some fiat from without. On this view 
experience does not begin with sensation as a purely 
passive state ; it presupposes activity ; and cognition 
with its distinction of subject and object is a conse- 
quence of this. In the absence of that distinction 
this activity is called unconscious. 

To be sure Fichte and Schopenhauer were singu- 
larists. But so far as the assumed relation of will to 
presentation is concerned, this seems more readily 
conceivable if there is a multiplicity of wills which 
interact, than if there is only a single will and nothing 
beside. In fact we seem then driven to assume a really 
inconceivable fractionation of the one unconscious will 
into many, in order that consciousness may arise 



Voluntarism 1 99 

Modern pluralists are, I think, almost invariably 
voluntarists, or as some of them prefer to call them- 
selves, pragmatists. As such, while they admit the 
impossibility of regressing to the beginning of evolu- 
tion, they deny that evolution requires a transcendent 
Prime Mover distinct from the Many : for the Many 
they hold are all prime movers, and so far causes sui. 
I say ' so far,' because the term causa sui is generally 
construed as equivalent to absolute ; but what is here 
meant, I take it, is only that each has an unconditional 
existence over against the rest while none has an 
unconditional experience. They are aware of each 
other in virtue of their own interaction : they interact 
in virtue of their inherent spontaneity. Will is the 
ratio essendi of presentation, presentation the ratio 
cognoscendi of will. Will is the logical prius, but as 
absolute beginnings are beyond us there is no question 
of chronological priority. The efficient causation in 
the world then is just this totality of prime movers, its 
final causation their organization into a higher unity. 

Bearing this distinction in mind, an obvious ob- 
jection made by von Hartmann, which would otherwise 
be a fatal objection, loses some of its force. " The 
aseity of the [one absolute] Substance," he says, is " for 
our discursive understanding, restricted [as that is] to 
the category of causality, the problem of problems ; 
because it implies only the negative statement that this 
being is no more the effect of an other. When however 
the understanding still persists in applying the usual 
causal category in this case too, then it terms the 
[absolute] Substance its own effect and its own cause, — 
the understanding thereby only making a mockery of 
itself. That the [absolute] Substance groundlessly is 



200 The Limits of Pluralism 

and not is not, that is for us the wonder of all wonders." 
A system of philosophy, he then goes on to urge, 
which multiplies this wonder innumerable times, as 
pluralism in his opinion does, stands self-condemned 1 . 
It might perhaps be replied that wonderfulness is 
inversely proportional to frequency. So far then 
v. Hartmann would be convicted of subtly begging the 
question. But pluralism, in fact, does not maintain 
that a world of n monads is a world of n absolutes. 
The totality may be called absolute, if there is nothing 
to condition it from without, but no one individual 
within it can be called absolute. Whether in the 
abstract an absolute totality of individuals or an absolute 
individual be the greater problem or the greater wonder 
is surely an idle question. The only real question is 
the question of fact. If pluralism is self-consistent and 
self-sufficient it does not become a problem, merely 
because it is wonderful. And the like again, of course, 
would hold true of singularism. 

But there is this difference between them, we start 
with the Many as given: so far they do not need to be 
'deduced.' With the One we do not thus start. At 
the same time it must be allowed that pluralism cannot 
furnish, has never attempted to furnish anything de- 
serving to be called a philosophical justification of 
itself — it is, as William James called it, radical em- 
piricism ; whereas for singularism in the abstract there 
have been ontological and a priori arguments in plenty. 
Pluralism, as Kant long ago remarked, is confined 
exclusively to cosmological arguments 2 . It starts with a 
discrete Many, severally related and therefore severally 

1 Kategorienlehre^ p. 528. 

2 Cf. his remarks on the thesis of the fourth antinomy. 



Pluralism to be rejected or transcended 201 

comparable, and beyond this its cardinal principles of 
continuity and evolution will not enable it to go. 
Neither by regressing can it reach a lowest limit or 
origin, in which all diversity is latent; nor by progressing 
can it reach a highest limit or goal in which all plurality 
is transcended. This, the pluralisms extremity, will 
doubtless be regarded as the singularist's opportunity. 
But the latter so far has never succeeded — without 
doing violence to the facts — in advancing beyond a 
more or less covert dualism of the One and the Many, 
of God and the World. The connexion of these two, 
that is to say, remains a problem. Thus in the latest 
and one of the most important expositions of singularism, 
its author, Mr Bradley, tells us: — "The fact of actual 
fragmentariness, I admit, I cannot explain. That 
experience should take place in finite centres, and 
should wear the form of finite 'thisness/ is in the end 
inexplicable. But" — he adds — "to be inexplicable and 
to be incompatible are not the same thing 1 ." Here we 
have the whole matter in a nutshell. If pluralism is 
* infected with contradictions,' as Mr Bradley affirms, 
we must turn, he contends, to singularism, that is to 
say, to Absolutism. If such an Absolute Being as he 
supposes, is possible, then, in view of the said contra- 
dictions, it must be declared actual. If, as we maintain, 
it is not possible, then we are reduced to scepticism, un- 
less the asserted contradictions can be resolved. Even 
though not compelled by contradictions altogether to 
abandon pluralism, we ought to prefer Theism if that 
systematizes more and disappoints less. The difficul- 
ties of pluralism then must be our next topic. 

1 Appearance and Reality, 2nd edn, p. 226. 



LECTURE X. 

PSYCHOPHYSICAL AND METAPHYSICAL DIFFICULTIES 
IN PLURALISM. 

There is one difficulty which the exposition I have 
attempted to give would so readily suggest, that it is 
perhaps best to mention it at the outset. The goal 
of final harmony and unification on which the personal 
idealist counts as — a far-off event, it may be, but still 
as — a rational possibility may yet never be attained, 
however rationally possible, because of what we ordi- 
narily call physical hindrances. Let these consist, if 
you like, of the actions of inferior — sentient it may 
be — but still irrational monads : the disaster would be 
none the less appalling on that account, nor is its 
possibility for that reason very seriously diminished. 
For we have had meantime to allow that millennial 
dreams of a liberation of Nature from the thraldom 
of so-called physical evil are as fanciful as the legends 
of this subjection as a consequence of moral evil. It 
is true there are modern pluralists, Renouvier certainly 
and probably Dr Howison, who still defend such views 
of the solidarity of the cosmos. But if we smile at 
Fourier when he imagined that, so soon as we have 
learnt to dwell in brotherly love together, the whales 
will seize our ships by their cables and tow them 
to their destinations over seas no longer briny but 
pleasant to drink, must we not regard it as still more 



Physical Difficulties 203 

extravagant to picture finite minds taming the earth- 
quake and the tornado, to say nothing of checking 
the stars in their courses and staying the clash of 
worlds ? For what to all appearance are physical 
set-backs, sometimes involving whole worlds, certainly 
exist. But they are the exception, not the rule. It 
may be that with time they will become rarer still. It 
may be too that as death is held to be but ' the covered 
way that leads to life/ so these catastrophes do but 
open up an unseen order, which we can only dimly 
surmise. All that the pluralist can safely do is still 
to assert the spiritual possibility of harmony among 
rationals ; and for the rest he can only maintain that 
the difficulty raised is one that also besets the theist's 
position. But there is this difference, the belief in an 
unseen world has a warrant, if theism is true, which 
pluralism alone cannot furnish : per contra the difficulty 
is graver for the one than it is for the other. On the 
whole then it will be best to defer these difficulties, 
which affect any theory of the world as a realm of ends, 
till they meet us again in our discussion of theism 1 . 

One remark, before passing for the present from 
this topic, may however here be made. It is a well- 
known opinion widely held by scientific men that 
the second law of thermodynamics, otherwise called 
the law of the dissipation of energy, points conclusively 
to universal death as the final goal of all. The 
pessimist von Hartmann professed to see in this 
law the chief consolation that science brings to men. 
But one recent pluralist makes an ingenious attempt 
to rebut the argument, that seems at least theoretically 

1 Cf. Lect. xvi. 



204 Difficulties in Pluralism 

sound. The process of degradation, he urges in the 
first place, is only asymptotic ; it will therefore never 
be complete 1 . And in the next place he maintains that, 
since in psychophysics it is the difference of intensities 
not their absolute amount that is significant, therefore 
life will always be possible 2 . But in truth the most 
effective reply is much simpler. The second law of 
thermodynamics is entirely statistical : it is not binding 
on the interaction of individuals at all. For the philo- 
sophy of personal idealism this law is so far then of 
no account. 

Another difficulty that besets pluralism, and one 
again from which theism is not altogether free, relates 
to the past and future existence of individuals beyond 
the range of our direct experience concerning them. 
How are we to interpret what we know as the birth 
and the death of a given L or M ? According to the 
pluralistic, as according to the Leibnizian view, all the 
individuals there are have existed from the first and 
will continue to exist indefinitely 3 . Birth and death, 
then, cannot really be what they seem to be. But it 
still remains true that every man, as we know him, 
came at a certain date upon this world's stage and, 
after playing his several parts for a brief interval, will 
presently pass off. Is he born and does he die but once, 

1 In this he had been already anticipated by Prof. Poynting. 
See Naturalism and Agnosticism, 3rd ed. 1. p. 321. 

2 L. Stern, 'Der zweite Hauptsatz der Energetik u.s.w.' Zeitschrift 
f. Philos. u. philos. Kritik, 1903. 

3 Pluralism, at all events, must assume that every monad relatively 
to every other is self-existent ; for obviously, if one were the ground 
of the existence of others, they and it would be related as Creator 
and created and could not belong to the same ontal series. 



The Problem of Birth 205 

or has he births and deaths innumerable ? The latter 
alternative, that of metempsychosis in various forms, 
most of them very extravagant, has long prevailed 
in the eastern world, while the other alternative, that 
of a single birth, has been current almost universally 
among the civilisations of the west. For many sin- 
gularistic philosophies, of course, the beginning of a 
soul-life, like everything that pertains to the Many, is 
nothing more than a phase or moment of the One. 
But Christian theism has always striven, however in- 
consistently, to see more in it than this. The doctrine 
known as creationism attributes the independent exist- 
ence of each human soul to a definite creative act ; 
while the opposite doctrine, called traducianism, holds 
that all souls are generated from other souls in the 
same way and at the same time as bodies from other 
bodies. Neither of these positions, between which 
theologians seem continually to have wavered, is com- 
patible with strict pluralism. The pluralist, in fact, 
seems shut up to some modification of Leibniz's doctrine 
that all souls have preexisted ' always in a sort of 
organized body,' which at the time of generation 
undergoes a certain transformation and augmentation. 
But the Leibnizian doctrine of emboitenient, that, for 
example, all mankind preexisted in Adam, modern 
biology, as we have seen, will not allow him to accept. 
Again, as we have also seen, he is not compelled to 
adopt the view to which Leibniz inclined, that reason 
is imparted to human souls at the time of birth ' by a 
special operation or by a kind of transcreationV 

But the pluralist may fairly be expected to come 
1 Theodicee, pt i, § 91. Cf. Lect. iv. pp. 90 ff. 



206 Diffictdties in Pluralism 

to closer quarters with the problem of heredity than 
Leibniz either did or could do. Here in the first 
place one point seems clear: what is metaphorically 
described as heredity — as if there were a bequest from 
one organism to another — is rather so much habit or 
memory, which pertains to the offspring in virtue of 
its original continuity with the ancestral stem. The 
process of regeneration, whereby an organism restores a 
lost part, and the process of budding, whereby it produces 
a new whole, are simply instances of such continuity. 
Even sexual reproduction, in spite of the important 
preliminary preparation that the maturation of its two 
constituents requires, seems to be essentially nothing 
more than the union of two buds. But in none of 
these processes, so far, is there any individual to be 
found that can be called the heir, and therefore no 
ground for calling their result a heritage. All we can 
say is that what has been done myriads of times is 
done once more : in regeneration or asexual reproduc- 
tion the old routine is repeated precisely; and in 
sexual reproduction there is the joint result of two 
compatible routines that are similar but not entirely 
identical. As evidence of the continuity of the process 
and the completeness of its routine we may appeal to 
the so-called biogenetic law or principle of palingenesis 
— that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. But is the 
new individual nothing but 'a chip off the old block,' 
nothing but a new specimen of the species regarded 
as self-repeating ? The lower the form of life that we 
consider the less ground have we for assuming more : 
there seems to be almost as much routine in the con- 
duct of the simplest organisms as there was in their 



The Problem of Heredity 207 

construction. Contrariwise the higher the form of life 
we take note of, the more we seem driven to assume 
that the organism has a director, and is not a mere 
automaton. It is here that we are led to talk of an 
heir and to regard the body as his heritage. This 
heir is the soul or dominant monad. But where does 
it come from and how does it get possession of this 
body ? These questions however implicitly contradict 
the pluralisms assumption, that souls do not get bodies 
but always have them. The biogenetic law is then a 
psychophysical law; in other words, it has a psycho- 
logical side ; hence to say that the genetic history 
of the individual summarizes the life-history of the race 
would better express this. 

One essential difference between the two is, of 
course, that the life-history of the race is original, is 
a long process of gradual acquisition by way of trial 
and error, in short, answers to what we have identified 
with natura naturans ; whereas the genetic history of 
the individual is a derivative, rapid and, so to say, 
substantially invariable process, in a word, is routine 
or natura naturata. This difference is apparent again 
in the dependence of the primary process on immediate 
commerce with the environment and the independence 
of the derivative process of any such intercourse. The 
eye which in the race has been developed in contact 
with the light is reproduced in the individual in dark- 
ness. The higher vertebrates, whose history has led 
them through the most varied environments — first 
water, then land, then water again, as in the case of 
the whales — complete their embryonic life directly 
shut off from environmental changes altogether. 



208 Difficulties in Pluralism 

According to Haeckel the life-history of the human 
race can be biologically marked out into sixteen stages 
of steadily increasing complication. "The entire suc- 
cession of men, throughout the whole course of ages," 
Pascal has said, "is to be regarded as one man always 
living and always learning 1 ." I have myself, to meet 
the needs of psychological exposition and yet leave 
aside the problem of heredity, made use of a similar 
idea. It will help us forward, I think, if I may be 
allowed to quote a passage from what I wrote years 
ago on this point: — "We know that in the course of 
each individual's life there is more or less of pro- 
gressive differentiation or development. Further, it 
is believed that there has existed a series of sentient 
individuals beginning with the lowest form of life and 

advancing continuously up to man But what was 

experience in the past has become instinct in the 
present. The descendant has no consciousness of his 
ancestors' failures, when performing at once by an 
' untaught ability ' what they slowly and perhaps pain- 
fully acquired. But, if we are to attempt to follow 
the genesis of mind from its earliest dawn, it is the 
primary experience rather than the eventual instinct 
that we have to keep in view. To this end, then, it 
is proposed to assume that we are dealing with one 
individual who has continuously advanced from the 
beginning of psychical life, and not with a series of 
individuals, all of whom, save the first, ' inherited ■ 
certain innate capacities from their progenitors. The 
life-history of such an individual, then, would correspond 

1 Pens'ees et Opuscules, edit. Brunschvicg, p. 80: quoted by Prof. 
Sorley, Ethics of Naturalism , 2nd ed., p. 249. 



The Problem of Heredity 209 

with all that was new in the life of a certain typical 
series of individuals, each of which advanced a stage 
in mental differentiation 1 ." Let us now suppose 
our imaginary immortal to be set back once more 
to the beginning but to retain the memory of his 
former experiences. We may be sure that in that 
case he will make good the ground lost in much less 
time than he required at first, and also without follow- 
ing all the windings of the tentative route into which 
his previous inexperience had led him : his route the 
second time will be routine. Illustrative instances in 
plenty will occur to everyone at once. 

But the situation we have supposed is exactly that 
of a new organism. It does repeat with no hesitation 
or uncertainty so much of the ancestral experience as 
had become habitual, secondarily automatic or organ- 
ized, and it does so because it is continuous with the 
organisms to which this work had been previously 
delegated 2 . To understand this we must regard the 
organism, in Leibnizian fashion, as an orderly hier- 
archy of monads and not as merely a vastly complex 
physico-chemical mechanism. The acquisition of new 
experience by commerce with the environment, the 
process that is to say of development through 

1 Article 'Psychology,' Ency. Brit, nth edn, vol. xxn. 

PP- 555 f- 

2 But, it may be objected, between the new organisms and the 
old there is always more or less 'variation': the two then are not 
strictly continuous. This we must allow, but on the other hand 
we may not assume that variation is ever independent of experience 
taken in the wide sense which the pluralist gives to it. In this 
way we can understand the fact that variations are vastly greater 
in sexual as compared with asexual reproduction. 

w. 14 



210 Difficulties in Pluralism 

experience — in which clearer and distincter percepts, 
wider and exacter adjustments are attained — is to be 
conceived as a process in which subordinate monads 
are drilled and manoeuvred : here it is that, as we say, 
function perfects structure. We may call it biotic as 
distinct from genetic organization. We know directly 
by observation that the memories and dexterities that 
are acquired latest are the least engrained and the 
first to fail. Entirely in keeping with this we observe 
too that it is specific characters rather than the generic 
characters, upon which they are superposed, that are 
liable to variation 1 . The transmissibility of acquired 
automatisms is then proportional to their persistence. 
To say that no acquired characters are transmitted 
would be tantamount to saying that nothing is trans- 
mitted ; and to say that the automatisms accomplished 
in a single lifetime are not in any degree transmissible 
is to say that transmission can never begin. In this 
gradation in the persistence of organic differentiations 
we have, it would seem, the key to the genetic history 
of the individual or ontogeny : till the lower and earlier 
automatisms are evolved there is no mMer for the 
higher and later, which depend upon them, to which 
they stand in the relation of matter to form. 

But a viable organism, after it has developed, con- 
tinues to grow or augment. It thus becomes possible 
at length not indeed mechanically to divide it, but 
still to divide it, so to say, selectively. Herein seems 
to lie the possibility of a new organism. In what way 
the sifting out, collecting and enrolling of supernu- 
meraries is effected we can at present hardly even 
1 Cf. Darwin's Origin of Species, 6th edn, pp. 121 f. 



The Problem of Heredity 2 1 1 

conjecture. The pluralist must at all events maintain 
that these processes depend in some way on the 
sentience and appetition of the several monads con- 
cerned and also on the affinities and antipathies which 
their natures determine. Provided some procedure 
on these lines is conceivable, that is sufficient to make 
his position tenable. Now that far at any rate we are 
able to go, helped, as in other cases, by the analogy 
of what we know of the higher phases of living inter- 
course. Indeed it is not too much to say that on 
these lines a far simpler hypothesis is conceivable 
than Weismann's of the continuity of germ-plasm, 
for example. But there still remain difficulties. 

Thus it is assumed that the supreme monad or 
soul of the system is within it from the first, but its 
dominance is manifest only towards the close of the 
genetic process ; but how is it attained ? How in 
particular, in sexual reproduction, when two colonies 
unite ? Is there here a rivalry or conflict between 
two potential monarchs ? Or is there possibly after 
all, as some psychologists suppose, no unity at all 
beyond that of the system : is that only a common- 
wealth and not a monarchy ? But such a view, though 
by no means devoid altogether of justification, seems 
inconsistent with pluralism; for, rigorously followed out, 
it would altogether destroy the notion of dominance 
on which the entire doctrine of monadism is built 1 . 
On the whole it seems best to regard the organism on 
its psychical side as simply the Anlage or primary 

1 And this by the way, it may be incidentally remarked, suggests 
an analogical argument in favour of a supreme world-spirit. 

14—2 



212 Difficulties in Pluralism 

medium of the soul's life : this is its heritage but 
how it comes by it we do not know 1 . 

We come now to the difficulties besetting the 
pluralistic interpretation of death. Why, it may be 
asked, should there be death at all, why should not 
the individual enjoy that prolonged existence which 
we have imagined only for expository purposes ? I 
do not propose however to enter upon the far-reaching 
inquiry which this question opens up, since the diffi- 
culties that more immediately concern us are of another 
sort. Death, as the more or less complete dissolution 
of the organism, means that the soul in consequence, 
so far as it is thus deprived of its locus standi, is, 
to use Leibniz's phrase, in the position of a deserter 
from the general order. Temporarily it is in a like 
position during sleep ; and death for Leibniz was but 
a longer and profounder sleep : in neither case did 
he believe that the continuity of the individual's life 
was completely broken. Still the amount of personal 
continuity between its successive lives might in general 
be extremely slight. In fact if the notion of a merely 
bodily resurrection was incredible in Leibniz's day it 
is more incredible still in our own. Who expects to 
see trilobites and ammonites, the pterodactyle and the 
diplodocus come to life again ? — No doubt we find 
the passage back from the organic to the inorganic 
barred on every side. Nature has no crematorium : 
she turns dead sheep and oxen into jackals and crows 
it may be, but not into ashes. Such facts would 
almost suggest that the best thing to befall a dying 
man would be to be eaten by such of his younger 
1 Cf. below, Lect. xvm. 



The Problem of Death 213 

contemporaries as liked him, and according to Professor 
Tylor personal affection was one among other motives 
for cannibalism 1 . At any rate 'metempsychosis' in 
some form seems an unavoidable corollary of thorough- 
going pampsychism 2 , so long as we look broadly at 
the facts of life as a whole. 

We have just noted in the economy of nature a 
tendency to conserve the organic : is there also some 
principle of ' conservation of value ' tending to prevent 
rational, self-conscious spirits from lapsing back into 
merely animal souls ? This question Leibniz answered 
with a decided affirmative. Thus in a letter to Arnauld, 
after substituting what he called metaschematism, 
change of body, for metempsychosis or change of soul, 
he continues : — " But spirits are not subjected to these 
revolutions, or rather it must be that these revolutions 
of bodies subserve the Divine economy in relation to 

spirits They must always keep their moral qualities 

and their memory in order to be perpetual citizens of 
that universal all-perfect commonwealth of which God 
is the monarch, which can lose none of its members 
and the laws of which are higher than those of 
bodies 3 ." Apart from its theological standpoint this 
is obviously a purely dogmatic statement. But the 
idea of a higher spiritual order, as we have already 
seen, is perfectly compatible with pluralism and — 
though it lack adequate empirical evidence — directly 

1 This practice, so-called endophagy, is "intelligible enough on 
the principle that 'the life is not allowed to go out of the family'." 
Chambers's Encyclopaedia, s.v. 

2 Cf. above, p. 205. 

3 Lettre a Arnauld, Philosophische Schriften, Gerhardt's ed. 11. 
pp. 99 f. 



214 Difficulties in Pluralism 

suggested by the principle of continuity, against which 
the Leibnizian theology more or less offends 1 . 

But without this idea and 'the conservation of 
values,' the Weltanschauung of pluralism is sadly far 
away from the heart's desire. The biologist pictures 
for us the gradual evolution of the human species 
onwards from some primitive moner, and the socio- 
logist the gradual advance of humanity from savagery 
to civilisation. But what of all this progress if we are 
forced to say of all the individuals concerned that one 
labours and another reaps the reward ? The indi- 
vidual, it may be, that falls out of the ranks for a time 
is not dead but only sleepeth, yet if he return not as 
the same identical person but only, so to say, as the 
same metaphysical entity ; and especially if, as the 
chances are, the higher his former position the more 
likelihood that he will start again in a lower one, what 
— we are forced once more to ask — what worth or 
meaning is there in such revolutions ? And when we 
remember that whole species become extinct, we may 
be told that at least the fittest survive. But then it 
is only in what we may call the ascending phase of 
things that the fitter is the better : when this earth 
enters upon its inevitable decline the fitter will be the 
worse. But every winter turns to spring, it is replied, 
and old worlds are continually rejuvenated. Yes, but 
once more we urge that if there is no personal conti- 
nuity between the old constituents and the new, if as 
with the individual beginning a new life, a world en- 
tering upon a fresh evolution cannot start where it left 
off and may even begin in less favourable conditions 
1 Cf Latta, Leibniz, The Monadology &<:., p. 265 note. 



' Conservation of Values ' 215 

than before, what ground have we to expect progress 
on the whole ? In a word, without such spiritual 
continuity as theism alone seems able to ensure, it 
looks as if a pluralistic world were condemned to a 
Sisyphean task. Per aspei'a ad astra may be its 
motto, but facilis descensus Averno seems to be its fate. 

Let us turn now to metaphysical difficulties. There 
is one such objection to pluralism that will at once 
occur to every student of Lotze's philosophy, one that 
is all the more impressive because Lotze — unlike most 
who maintain the doctrine of an Absolute One — 
starts as we have done from the side of the Many, 
which seems to confront us at first. He finds however 
that the concept of causal interaction or 'transeunt 
action' as he terms it, which we ordinarily employ 
alike in everyday life and in our scientific expositions, 
is really unthinkable. He is therefore driven to 
postulate an absolute substance, of which the Many 
are in truth but states or modifications. Moreover 
such a fundamental unity of things was, it seemed to 
him, analytically involved in the facts of what we 
conceive as reciprocal action. But what is strange is 
that Lotze, who was never a dualist, who from first 
to last was clear upon one point, viz., that there are 
no things that are things and nothing more, should 
nevertheless have discussed this problem of causation 
in connexion with physical action. He is aware, of 
course, that for the scientific investigator who is con- 
tent to stop at ' occasional causes ' there is no problem 
at all ; he has indeed himself emphasized the methodo- 
logical utility of occasionalism in its modern or positivist 



216 Difficulties in Pluralism 

guise. But for philosophy the question, how or why, 
when the state of a certain thing A changes to a, that 
of another thing B should change to /3, has been a 
serious problem since the days of Hume at any rate. 
Assuming that A and B are independent things, Lotze's 
argument in its barest outline is simple enough. Since 
attributes cannot be separated from substances, "no 
state can detach itself from the thing A, whose state 
it was, so as to subsist even for an infinitesimally small 
moment between A and B, as a state but yet nobody's 
state, and then connect itself with B so as to become 
its state 1 ." The facts themselves not being in question 
the only conclusion according to Lotze is that A and 
B are not independent substances, that is not sub- 
stances at all, but only different modifications of the 
one absolute substance, which we may call M. The 
state of the universe at the one moment he represents 
by the equation M=<f)(ABR) and that at the other 
as M=(f> (a/3B); that is to say he regards the Absolute 
as compensating one change of state, that of A into a, 
by the other, that of B into ft ; the rest of the universe, 
represented by B, being, for simplicity's sake, regarded 
as in the particular case remaining unaffected. 

But considering so-called 'things' apart, this doctrine 
of Lotze's seems very closely to resemble Berkeley's 

1 It was long assumed that this difficulty only applies to ' action 
at a distance' and not to 'contact action.' And so far as perception 
or the constructions of abstract mechanics are concerned this may 
be true. But actual bodies are not ideal solids ; they are more like 
clouds, or swarms of particles in motion. Moreover absolute contact 
implies a common point or surface (interface), in fact no longer 
contiguity but continuity. Cf. Naturalism and Agnosticism, 3rd edn, 
1. pp. 122 ff. 



The Problem of Interaction 2 1 7 

well-known doctrine of sense-symbolism. The entire 
physical world, ' the whole choir of heaven and furni- 
ture of earth,' is but the medium, divinely constituted 
and sustained — as it were the language and the instru- 
mentality — whereby finite spirits communicate and 
interact. Now it seems prima facie perfectly possible 
to adapt this doctrine to the pluralistic standpoint : in 
fact in some way or other the pluralist must regard 
all perceptual objects as the manifestation of subjects 
or ejects. There would be important differences of 
detail, no doubt ; for example, as we have already said, 
we should begin with a Babel and have to achieve 
'one language and one speech.' In short the equation 
by which Lotze typifies the 'self-conservation' of his 
Absolute seems so far to answer simply to what we 
might call its behaviour in sustaining the intercourse 
of free agents, if such a medium were necessary, as 
he for the most part inclined to doubt : his equation 
amounts in fact merely to the doctrine of physical 
conservation. 

When however A and B are not things but per- 
sons, can we still say that they are merely modifications 
of the Absolute ? When A changes to a — when the 
child, feeling hunger, wants food, let us say, and B his 
father, let us suppose, thereupon changes to /3, that 
is, gives him bread — are we to believe that the persons 
here are not beings for themselves but only so-called 
things, that they are nothing but modifications of an 
Absolute, that adjusts one to the other solely on its 
own account ? Such an interpretation of personal 
intercourse is clearly untenable and Lotze did not 
seriously entertain it. The description that he has 



218 Difficulties in Pluralism 

given of personal intercourse, regarded from the side 
of the Many, differs entirely from the conceptual 
framework by which science summarises what is called 
physical interaction. There is here no constant equa- 
tion involving rigidly concatenated variables, no net- 
work of relations of which individuals are but the 
termini, no lines of direction subsisting between them 
along which in some mysterious way actions and 
passions are interchanged. The spatial metaphor of 
influences, energies or forces transferred and trans- 
formed, which makes up the concept of transeunt 
action, is no longer applicable even as a figure to 
personal intercourse. The doings and sufferings of 
persons are both alike immediate : what brings them 
into relation is a ' sympathetic rapport ' or interest that 
rests upon cognition. All that is strictly personal in 
social intercourse is of this nature. It entirely consists, 
in the first place, of the apprehension or the know- 
ledge on the part of one person of the ' attitude,' the 
feelings and intentions displayed or announced by other 
persons; secondly, in their cooperation or opposition, 
actual or prospective ; and finally, following on this, 
in the new feelings and intentions of the person in- 
terested, to which this knowledge leads. We can 
readily imagine situations in abundance that are al- 
together of this sort, into which — even when life itself 
is at stake — no physical constraint whatever directly 
enters. Think, for instance, of all that the phrase 
' noblesse oblige ' implies, of Regulus returning to 
Carthage, of Socrates refusing to fly, of the Hindoo 
suttee, which means, I understand, 'virtuous wife,' or of 
the Japanese 'hari kari or 'happy despatch'; or again 



'Sympathetic Rapport' 219 

of the wiles of the hunter and the angler, who have 
to count simply on the behaviour of their game till it 
brings itself into a position to be dealt with, so to say, 
as a thing. It is, however, as needless as it would be 
tedious to picture out such cases in detail. 

But usually in these cases there is, in addition to 
the conduct of those primarily concerned, that of sub- 
ordinates and accessories, upon which they can safely 
count — the law and the police, impartial spectators, 
servants and retainers ; and again dogs, decoys, stalking 
horses and the like. All this we may call social environ- 
ment in a wide sense : upon it we rely and depend, much 
as we rely and depend upon what we call the physical 
environment. And we have seen already that this 
social environment, so far as habit and custom enter 
into it, tends to approximate to the character of the 
physical environment : nay that very character, which 
we express by such terms as law and order, subject 
and attribute, is, we know, so much metaphor borrowed 
from the world of persons. For the pluralist, however, 
it is more than metaphor. If the Leibnizian as- 
sumption, that there are no beings entirely devoid of 
perception and spontaneity — which Lotze too accepted 
— is otherwise sound, then the objections to transeunt 
action between things become irrelevant. For these 
objections do not apply to personal interaction based on 
mutual rapport, which is all that the pluralist requires. 
On the contrary the very fact that this suffices for 
his view of the world is so far an argument in its 
favour. 

But there is still another objection to pluralism, 
likewise urged by Lotze, that is more serious. 



220 Difficulties in Pluralism 

Granted that sentient and conative beings can shape 
their conduct relatively to each other — in so far as 
they are clearly aware of each other's presence and 
attitude — without the need of another being distinct 
from them all to play the part of a go-between, still 
the fact that such 'sympathetic rapport' exists is 
in Lotze's opinion nothing less than an 'inexhaustible 
wonder.' Nay the mere fact that all the Many are 
comparable and commensurable, that no individual, 
however unique, is altogether disparate and isolated 
from the rest, though undeniable, is such a wonder : 
only extreme familiarity leads us to take it for granted 
as a matter of course. Lotze is content to press only 
this second broader and simpler issue, which he regards 
as a form of the cosmological argument 1 . The first 
which approximates rather to the teleological argument 
he seems content to waive. Still it may be well to 
look at both. 

Let us begin with the argument in its more de- 
tailed form. We can readily imagine a case sufficiently 
analogous to bring out the point of the argument, 
how very far the actual relatedness of things is from 
being self-evident or self-explanatory. Let us suppose 
that we had a sack of type continually shuffled, which 
differs however from ordinary type in one respect. 
When letters forming syllables come together we will 
suppose that their arrangement remains comparatively 
stable, that when syllables forming words come together 
this arrangement is still more stable, and similarly 
of words forming sentences and so on ; that generally 
the more meaning the more stability. Under such 
1 Microcosmus, Eng. trans, vol. n. pp. 668 f. 



The Implications of Theology 221 

circumstances the more 'sense' the final arrangement 
presented the more we should be inclined to believe 
that we had been dealing from the first not with a 
random collection but with a definite selection, with 
what, in fact, was all along really a whole and not 
merely an aggregate. And should the final arrange- 
ment be complete and perfect without one redundant 
or deficient letter, this presumption would amount to 
certainty. 

No doubt the better fitting arrangements of our 
world are to be regarded as the more stable arrange- 
ments. The Many however are not, like type, moulded 
unalterably once for all : on the contrary they must 
be regarded as more or less plastic and adaptable, as 
mutually moulding each other in a greater or less 
degree. The round man, to be sure, avoids the square 
hole ; and yet if circumstances force him into it, he 
usually contrives to adapt it or to adapt himself. The 
limpet shapes its shell to fit the rock, the Pholas shapes 
the rock to fit its shell. And after all, the teleological 
harmony to be found in the world is not such as to 
force on us the conviction that it is due solely to a 
single underlying or overruling principle. "Taken 
alone," Lotze himself allows, "it would more easily 
lead to the polytheistic view of a plurality of divine 
beings, each dominating a special department of nature 
as its special genius, their diverse modes of adminis- 
tration agreeing too so far as to attain to a certain 
general compatibility but not to a harmony that is 
altogether complete 1 ." But then is it not strange to 
maintain that the pluralistic view, which is admittedly 
suggested directly by the facts of the world, is yet 
1 Op. at. vol. 11. p. 667. 



222 Difficulties in Pluralism 

really inconceivable, and that the opposite view, which 
the facts seem at first sight to negative, is nevertheless 
the only view that is not self-contradictory ? This, 
however, is what Lotze does : let us next examine this 
position somewhat more closely. 

The Many are all related : they interact. This 
interrelation is at once the ratio essendi and the ratio 
cognoscendi of their comparability. No two are al- 
together different, for all are conative and cognitive to 
some extent. Such is the familiar pluralistic doctrine. 
And now, says Lotze, because all this is so, the Many 
are substantially one, are only different modifications 
of a single Being that we designate the Absolute 1 . 
The Many are either severally comparable or they 
are not. If they are not, there can be no knowledge 
of their plurality : if they are, then they are funda- 
mentally and ultimately one. Such is Lotze's short 
and easy method with pluralism. It yields, I fear, 
only a 'cheap and easy monism.' There can be no 
experience of a plurality, whether of beings, qualities 
or events, that are absolutely disparate and discon- 
nected — that is certain. All experienced diversity 
implies some identity ; and, for the matter of that, all 
experienced identity some diversity. All this is so 
much logical commonplace. From this it follows that 
to every known or knowable Many there will be some 
common term applicable to them all, which logically 
unifies them all. But it leaves the question of their 
real unity untouched. Ice, water, steam, is a plurality 
which turns out to consist only of varying states of 
one substance. Gold, silver, copper, is a plurality 
which has not been thus unified : logically it belongs 
1 Cf. Grundziige der Metaphysik, 1883, § 48. 



The Many and the One 223 

to the one class, metal. The class is logically one, 
but we do not say there must be a single prime and 
ultimate metal. The Many of pluralism are in like 
manner a logical whole: they constitute the class of 
entelechies or persons in the widest sense, beings, that 
is to say, who are something for themselves, conative 
and cognitive individuals bent on self-conservation and 
seeking the good. To resolve the logical universal 
itself into a personal individual, of which the several 
persons that it denotes are but modifications, so far 
from explaining the facts denoted, seems flatly to con- 
tradict them. Yet this is what Lotze does. To be 
sure the Many are more than a logical whole : they 
are a real unity, but a unity of another order, just as 
a regiment is a unity though it is not a soldier. This 
other unity answers to the fact — a fact, it is important 
to notice, which perception and appetition imply — viz., 
that the Many are severally related by their mutual 
interaction : for each, as subject, the rest constitute 
an objective continuum. We have not, I repeat, two 
distinct and separable facts, first the Many existing 
in isolation, and then their interaction, either subse- 
quently intervening as a real mutuum commercium for 
them or else preestablished as a merely 'ideal' harmony 
independently of them : the former answering to the 
Herbartian, the latter to the Leibnizian pluralism. 
For modern pluralism the universe is the totality of 
monads really interacting ; and this is one fact. The 
plurality implies this unity and this unity implies the 
plurality. But this fact, says Lotze, is an inexhaustible 
wonder. Unquestionably the universe is an inex- 
haustible wonder. Still after all a wonder is not a 
contradiction. Returning then to Lotze's formula, 



224 Difficulties in Pluralism 

M=$(ABR) or (j>(ABR) = M, for the mere equation 

gives no priority to one side over the other; if it can 

be shown that M is more than the name we give 

to a plurality of reals A, B, C, . .., whose functional 

relation is symbolised by <j> — that M is in fact itself 

the one absolute reality, and <f> the relation which ' its 

individuality as a self-conserving unity ' imposes upon 

its several differentiations or modes A, B, C... — all well 

and good. But the mere formula will not accomplish 

this. Taken as an abstract formula it may suggest 

either alternative, but taken as a description of the 

universe or mundus, M, regarded empirically or a 

posteriori, it is no longer equally ambiguous. From 

this immanent standpoint M does not resolve the 

wonder, it merely names it. If we are to get any 

further we must assume that M is transcendent, an 

ens extramundanum, to use Kant's phrase; and this 

all theism does that is worthy of the name. Then, 

however, A, B, R will no longer be merely modes or 

states of this M. But to express the relation of this 

transcendent Being to the world of experience no equa- 

tional formula seems either appropriate or adequate. 

Theism, however, promises to effect much in resolving 

the difficulties of pluralism, and to the careful discussion 

of theism I propose to devote the second part of these 

lectures. Meanwhile I think we must insist that the 

way cannot be cleared in any summary fashion by 

convicting the pluralisms Weltanschauung not merely 

of incompleteness but of actual contradictions. In 

fact, if it were radically infected with contradictions, 

we have seen, I trust, that the way to theism would 

be hopelessly barred ; for from pluralism speculation 

really always has and always must begin. 



PART II. 
THEISM, 



LECTURE XL 

THE IDEA OF CREATION. 

We have seen that modern pluralism is, on its own 
confession, ' radically empirical.' It makes no attempt 
to deduce the universe from a single absolute principle, 
or indeed to deduce it at all. The world is taken 
simply as we find it, as a plurality of active individuals 
unified only in and through their mutual interactions. 
These interactions again are interpreted throughout 
on the analogy of social transactions, as a mutuum 
commercium ; that is to say, as based on cognition and 
conation. To the speculative mind pur sang there is 
nothing satisfactory about such a view unless perhaps 
its frankness. 

But then, on the other hand, there are objections to 
all attempts to proceed altogether a pidori. It seems 
obviously puerile to ask, for example, for a sufficient 
reason why there is something rather than nothing. 
This notion of being absolutely thoroughgoing, of 
building up a metaphysic without presuppositions, 
one that shall start from nothing and explain all, is, 
I repeat, futile. Such a metaphysic has its own 

w. 15 



226 The Idea of Creation 

assumption, and that an absurd one, viz., that nothing 
is the logical prius of something. Well at any rate, it 
may be said, if we must start from something, let us at 
least start from what is absolutely necessary, or rather 
let us not stop till we reach it : let us not rest in what 
is merely actual, for that can only be contingent. But, 
paradoxical though it may sound, necessary being is 
but another aspect of contingent being ; for within the 
limits of our experience only that is called really 
necessary which is inevitably conditioned by its cause, 
and is thus contingent on this, that is to say, follows 
from it. In other words real as distinct from formal 
necessity is synonymous with causation ; and moreover, 
as Kant said, this real or causal necessity " extends no 
further than the field of possible experience, and even 
then does not apply to the existence of things as sub- 
stances ; because such substances can never be looked 
upon as empirical effects or as something that happens 
or comes to be 1 ." Thus to talk of absolutely necessary 
being as the foundation of the universe, so to say, is 
only to be guilty of the fallacy of Locke's poor Indian 
philosopher, the fallacy of applying to the whole a 
concept that is applicable only to the part. " The 
favourite notion of the philosophers," said Schopenhauer 
with wonted bitterness, "of 'absolutely necessary 
being ' involves a contradiction : the predicate ' abso- 
lute,' which means ' dependent on nothing else,' 
removes the characteristic through which alone 'neces- 
sary ' is thinkable and has any sense 2 ." The absolute 
totality of being has no cause, it simply is. To attempt 

1 Critique of Pure Reason , M. Miiller's trans, p. 198. 

2 Vierfache Wurzel, u.s.w. § 49. 



Metaphysic without presuppositions 227 

to reflect causation back on itself as in such phrases as 
causa sui } aseity, or being through self, really adds 
nothing to our bare recognition of this being. But if 
there is no sense in calling the absolute totality of 
being necessary, there is none in calling it contingent. 
Within it there is necessity and contingency in plenty : 
every part is related to the rest : but the whole, we 
have again to say, simply is. 

If then the whole simply is, those philosophers 
have only deluded themselves, who have essayed by 
the royal road of pure thought to determine a priori 
what it must be. The only a priori statements con- 
cerning the world that are beyond challenge are purely 
formal statements ; yet the entire body of logical and 
mathematical truths would not yield us the faintest 
anticipatory gleam of what the actual world would 
be, even if it were possible to know such truths in 
advance. But this supposition too is only a delusion : 
for validity implies reality and is otherwise meaningless. 
The two are distinct but they are not absolutely 
separable. The notion of a sort of antecedent logical 
fate determining all subsequent existence is psycho- 
logically explicable as the result — not of the supremacy 
of our reason — but of the limitations of our imagination. 
We distinguish relatively to a particular case between 
form and matter. But when we make the distinction 
absolute, pure form and pure matter both alike become 
empty abstractions. We find the logical to be in 
every case necessary, the empirical in every case 
contingent ; but we are guilty of a sort of fallacia 
compositions when we imagine that the totality of the 
empirical on the one side is conditioned by the totality 

15—2 



228 The Idea of Creation 

of the logical on the other 1 . The enormous labour 
that Kant is known to have spent in deducing his 
table of categories from his logical table of judgments 
is perhaps the most disastrous instance of mistaken 
ingenuity to be found in the whole history of philo- 
sophy ; for to that in very large measure may be traced 
the daring but hopeless enterprises of his idealist suc- 
cessors, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Nobody ever 
has, nobody ever will, derive the categories of sub- 
stance, cause, end, or any other concept concerning 
reality, from any source altogether independent of 
experience. 

All ontology alike then has to begin with the 
question : What is Reality 2 ? And nowadays pluralist 
and singularist alike answer : It is Experience. But 
the difference between them is that the pluralist is 
content to stop at the totality of finite experiences, 
whereas the singularist, or at all events the theist, with 
whom we are now primarily concerned, maintains that 
beyond the universe of the Many there is a single 
transcendent experient, who comprehends the whole. 

The superiority of the theistic position, if it can be 
sustained, seems indisputable : it will then be, to use 
Kant's words, " an ideal without a flaw." Well, in the 
first place, it is superior in respect of its unity. On 
the pluralistic view every one of the finite individuals 
is related to all the rest but only for himself. In 

1 Cf. Lotze, Microcosmus, Eng. trans, n. p. 705 and Metaphysic, 
§ 88 fin. 

2 This may entail a preliminary inquiry into the nature of 
knowledge, but epistemology is after all only a preparation for 
ontology. 



The T heist ic Ideal 229 

Leibnizian language each mirrors the whole from a 
unique standpoint, and therefore not the whole, but 
only an aspect of the whole. The pluralistic whole, 
then, is a whole of experiences, but not a whole ex- 
perience, a whole of lives but not a living whole, a 
whole of beings but without a complete and perfect 
being. Is such a whole really a unity at all : is it 
more than a totality ? We have a type of a higher 
unity than this in our own experience as self-conscious 
subjects. Here there is a unity which is more than 
the related objective continuum, a unity to which all 
this belongs and refers. Now remove from such an 
experience the relativity which ■ standpoint ' implies 
and you approach the theistic ideal of an absolute ex- 
perience, the experience of a living and acting Spirit 
whose ' centre is everywhere, whose circumference is 
nowhere,' an experience complete at all points and 
including every one. The pluralisms universe in the 
light of this transcendent Being would thus have a 
unity which it would otherwise lack. 

Not only so, but in the second place the pluralisms 
universe would itself be immeasurably enriched if the 
theistic idea of God's relation to this universe were 
accepted. For according to that God is not simply a 
transcendent Being, existing aloof and apart from the 
world, he is also immanent, and active within it. And 
such active presence of the One Spirit, who alone 
knows all, affords — manifestly — an assurance that the 
pluralisms ideal will be attained, an assurance which we 
have had to allow must else be wanting. For it would 
be extravagantly arbitrary to assume that this one 
transcendent Being alone would be more devoid of 



230 The Idea of Creation 

benevolent purpose than finite beings are. At any 
rate the theist believes that this God who knows all 
loves all. And so in the third place it is evident that 
the theistic idea not merely adds to our confidence 
in the eventual realisation of the pluralisms ideal but 
it enhances the character of that ideal by all the 
ineffable blessedness that the presence of God must 
yield. 

But to determine what is reality, we have agreed, 
is the first business of philosophy. Can we then prove 
the existence of God ? Attempts innumerable to prove 
this have been made — as of course we know — all of 
them reducible to one or other of the three forms called 
respectively the ontological, the cosmological and the 
teleological argument. The fatal defects of all these 
have, it is almost universally conceded, been clearly 
exposed once for all by Kant. The ontological 
argument, as he has shown, involves the common 
metaphysical fallacy of hypostatizing an idea ; the 
teleological argument does not carry us beyond 
pluralism; and the cosmological only does so by 
implicitly assuming the ontological. — But though de- 
monstrations of the existence of God are unattainable, 
it by no means follows that the idea is theoretically 
worthless. It has even in this respect — to say nothing 
of its practical value — a 'regulative use' as what Kant 
called a focus imaginarius, a use which he declared to 
be not only admirable but indispensable. What Kant 
meant by a foctis imaginartus, it may be worth while 
to illustrate by an example. Suppose the earth were 
wrapt in cloud all day while the sky was clear at night, 
so that we were able to see the planets and observe 



Theoretical value of Theism 231 

their movements as we do now, though the sun itself 
was invisible. The best account we could give of the 
planetary motions would still be to refer them to what 
for us in accordance with our supposition would only 
be an imaginary focus, but one to which was assigned 
a position identical with the sun's position. The 
pluralisms universe, according to Kant, answers to the 
wandering orbs that we see and God to the sun, which 
we are supposed not to see, but merely to conceive as 
giving to their motions both reason and unity. It 
behoves us then, especially in view of the acknowledged 
difficulties and incompleteness of the pluralistic scheme 
taken alone, to examine this sublime conception with 
reverence and with care. Is the theistic ideal verily 
without a flaw ? 

One thing is at once clear: theism is not simply the 
possible crown and completion of pluralism : such a 
transcendent addition will, it may be expected, change 
all. It introduces one essential modification, at any 
rate, viz., the idea of creation. It does not, that is to 
say, assume merely that one transcendent Being exists 
above and beyond the whole series of the Many, how- 
ever extended ; but it assumes further that this one 
Being is related to them in a way in which none of 
them is related to the rest : they do not simply coexist 
along with it, they exist somehow in it and through 
it. 

In this idea of creation there are two sides to 
consider, its relation to the world and its relation to 
God. As to the first — it cannot be said that the world 
as we know it involves the idea of creation as a fact. 
If it did, we should have direct and tangible evidence 



232 The Idea of Creation 

of God's existence. " The heavens declare the glory 
of God and the firmament sheweth his handiwork," 
sang the Psalmist long ago. Possibly it is so, but 
there is nothing in all our physical experience that 
compels us to admit it : on the other hand there is 
nothing that would justify us in denying it. Further, 
the metaphor of making, of handiwork, which is the 
sole empirical content of the term ' creation,' is in- 
adequate : making out of nothing, in short, is a 
contradiction. But then this is not the meaning of 
creation : it is not a making or shaping at all. The 
idea is, in fact, like the idea of God, altogether trans- 
cendent. It is impossible therefore that experience 
should directly give rise to it at all. 

But, it has been urged, the universe cannot have 
existed for ever, since in that case, at any assigned 
moment, an infinite time would be completed, and that 
is impossible. The universe must then have had a 
beginning and so must have had a First Cause. Well, 
if this argument were valid, it would apply equally to 
the existence of God. If per impossibile we could 
transcend experience and contemplate the world from 
without we might, it has been thought, find that the 
world had a beginning : but then we should be there 
and as what should we have to be reckoned ? Keeping 
within experience we can only endlessly regress with 
no prospect of ever reaching the beginning or of 
forming any concept of what it was like. On the 
contrary, say certain physicists, we have empirical 
evidence of a beginning. But in all cases it will be 
found, I think, that the beginning affirmed is a purely 
relative one ; and moreover that its affirmation assumes 






Mistaken views of Creation 233 

modern science to be exactly and absolutely, and not 
merely approximately, true 1 . 

There is equally little to support the view of creation 
as an event that occurred at a finite date in the past, 
when we attempt to regard it from the side of God as 
creator. Whatever the reason or motive for creation 
may have been — and some motive or reason the theist 
must assume — it seems " absolutely inconceivable," as 
v. Hartmann put it, " that a conscious God should wait 
half an eternity content without a good that ought to 
be." If creation means anything, it means something 
so far involved in the divine essence, that we are 
entitled to say, as Hegel was fond of saying, that 
" without the world God is not God." In calling God 
the creator then it is simply the world's dependence on 
Him that we mean to express. If so. it seems clear 
that this dependence is not, as commonly maintained, 
a causal dependence strictly understood. For causation 
relates to change in existence ; but creation regarded 
from the side of the created is not a change in anything 
existing. To speak of it as a change in nothing, 
whereby nothing becomes something, is once again — 
it seems hardly needful to say — mere thoughtless 
absurdity. Creation in other words is not to be 
brought under the category of transeunt causation. 
Nor can we, regarding it from the side of God, bring 
it under the category of immanent causation, as being 
a change in Him, unless indeed we abandon the 

1 Cf., e.g., The Unseen Universe, 2nd edn, § 116 and Clifford's 
criticism, Lectures and Essays, 2nd edn, p. 156; also the article 
by Professor Arrhenius, 'Infinity of the Universe,' Monist, vol xxi. 
1911, pp. 161 if. 



234 The Idea of Creation 

position that God is God only as being creative. To 
say that the world depends on God is tantamount to 
saying that could God cease to be, the world too would 
cease to be ; or that if the world should cease to be, it 
would be because God had ceased to be. In other 
words God is the ground of the world's being, its ratio 
essendi. The notion of ' ground,' it will, I assume, be 
conceded, is wider than that of cause, which is only 
one of its special forms. 

But we have not yet brought out the full meaning 
of creation as the theist conceives it. Spinoza, for 
example, also conceived God to be the ground of the 
world, but interpreted this relation in a way which the 
theist cannot accept. Spinoza, as his phrase Deus 
sive Natura shows, identified the world and God as 
completely as he identified the properties of a triangle 
with the triangle itself: the reality of the One meant 
so much that there was no reality left for the Many at 
all. For pantheism God is the immanent ground of 
the world, for deism he is the transcendent ground, 
for theism he is both. How are we to conceive this 
twofold relation ? The most hopeful attempt perhaps 
is that which is nowadays associated with the name of 
Kant, though it is really, I believe, as old as Plato and 
recurs continually in ancient and modern philosophy 
alike. I may call it the theory of intellective intuition. 
Our knowledge according to Kant has two stems, both 
requisite to complete our experience. The one, sensi- 
bility, is receptive and passive ; but taken alone it is 
blind, that is to say it furnishes only the material of 
knowledge. The other, understanding, is active but 
yields only the form of knowledge : taken alone it is 



God as transcendent and immanent 235 

empty, its content is abstract. But together these two 
sources yield what we call phenomenal knowledge ; so 
far we may, according to Kant, be said to shape Nature 
though we do not create it ; our objective knowledge, 
in other words, is the joint result of the manifold data 
that we receive and of the discursive synthesis of these 
which our thought achieves. Reality is first there, is 
given, and our work — all we are capable of — is to 
understand it. But now we are to imagine our sensory 
and passive perception replaced by an active, in- 
tellective 'position,' our discursive synthesis by an 
original thesis or intuition. The Being to whom this 
intellective intuition belongs will be creative ; its ob- 
jective experience will contain nothing that is merely 
given to it, but only what is ultimately ' posited ' by it : 
its objects will be not phenomenal but noumenal, not 
independent manifestations of an Other but the creation 
of itself. 

But the world as presented to us is veritably an 
Other ; hence the passivity in our perception : we 
know the world only in this its external relation to us, 
not as it is in itself; hence it is phenomenal. Here 
the distinction, the duality, of subject and object is real. 
But in intellective intuition all real difference between 
being and knowing, thought and thing, seems to have 
vanished. Such intuition, in fact, implies far more 
than we ordinarily understand even by omniscience 1 . 
For as our relative and imperfect knowledge does not 
partially constitute the being of its object, so absolute 
and perfect knowledge, if merely knowledge, would not, 
we seem entitled to say, constitute its object completely. 

1 Omniscience, literally taken, is still science, not intuition. 



236 The Idea of Creation 

Our partial knowledge of a thing is knowledge of its 
utterances, attitude and behaviour as they are for us : 
hence we call this relative knowledge. But a know- 
ledge of all such characteristics of all things in all their 
interactions would still only be absolute as knowledge : 
i.e., it would be as absolute or complete as knowledge 
can be, which, by its very nature, is essentially relative. 
It would leave the things themselves still independent 
as regards their existence, and so would fall short of this 
intellective intuition wherein, it is supposed, they are 
not merely known but whereby they exist. Thus then 
the idea of a transcendent experient, whose stand- 
point, so to say, is ubiquitous, does not reach to the 
still more transcendent idea of a creator, of one who 
is the ground of the objects that he ' knows.' 

Moreover immediate experience of another subject 
is beyond any knowledge that we have or can conceive : 
in fact it might, I think, be fairly maintained that the 
very idea involves a contradiction. If now it be further 
allowed that the actions of free and advancing intelli- 
gences make new beginnings possible, imply real 
initiative, it would follow that even complete and 
absolute knowledge (or omniscience), as knowledge is 
ordinarily understood, would still leave every finite 
subject in the position of an eject : each would be 
known completely as regards its utterances, its objective 
relations with the rest, but not as it is in itself. But 
more than this, it will be said, is implied in the divine 
so-called omniscience as theism understands it : " the 
Lord seeth not as man seeth ; for man looketh on the 
outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart." 
And why ? "He that keepeth thy soul doth not he 



God as transcendent and immanent 237 

know it 1 ?" Such ' omniscience ' in a word presupposes 
creation ; thus it is only for creative intuition that 
the knowing and the being of objects could be said 
to be in any sense the same. 

But then, so far — on the principle of the identity of 
indiscernibles — is not this so-called knowledge or in- 
tuitive thought of the object as such itself just the 
object, and is not the object just this so-called knowledge 
or intuition ? In that case what becomes of the divine 
transcendence on which theism lays such stress? Do not 
theism and pantheism after all come to the same thing : 
God is the world and the world is God ? But identity, 
if it is to mean anything, must imply some difference : 
there is no point, for example, in saying ' This is the 
same ' unless I refer to something experienced pre- 
viously. The bare, and therefore meaningless, identity 
of God and World simply leaves us with God only, as 
in the acosmism of Spinoza ; or with World only, as in 
the ' polite atheism of Schopenhauer. But, it is urged, 
there is, after all, a difference and one which our own 
self-consciousness enables us to understand. Here the 
knower and the known are one and the same, and yet 
are distinct in so far as the subject is its own object. 
Moreover self-consciousness is the only form of know- 
ledge that can be in a sense absolute. Knowledge of 
an Other, so long as the Other is veritably such, must 
ever be relative and incomplete ; whereas we cannot 
call our consciousness of self merely phenomenal. 
True, but — as I have already urged in the second 
lecture 2 — throughout our experience the consciousness 
of self involves the consciousness of not-self : the two 

1 1 Sam. xvi. 7 ; Prov. xxiv. 12. 2 Lect. 11. pp. 30, 41. 



238 The Idea of Creation 

being always correlative and coordinate. It does not 
surprise us then to find certain of the philosophies of 
the Absolute represent it as coming to self-consciousness 
in and through consciousness of the world. From 
such a view it is but a step to a philosophy of the 
Unconscious, such as v. Hartmann and others have 
constructed mainly on a Hegelian basis. And we may 
note by the way, as an odd illustration of extremes 
meeting, that v. Hartmann's ' clairvoyance of the 
Unconscious' or 'Over-conscious' is but a bad set- 
ting of the old idea of intellective intuition 1 . The 
attempt, therefore, to equate creation regarded as 
intellective intuition with a pure or absolute self-con- 
sciousness — if this were conceivable — will not avail for 
theism : it leaves no room for the divine transcendence 
and without this the distinctness of God and the world 
and the dependence of the world on God both alike 
disappear. Our result so far then is simply this : 
neither absolute knowledge nor absolute self-conscious- 
ness can take the place of the idea of creation ; and 
therefore, if the notion of intellective intuition or in- 
tuitive understanding is to help us, we must find more 
in the activity which it after all implies than thought or 
knowledge of any sort will cover ; and also more than 
such identity as self-knowing and self-known implies. 

We may discern perhaps a faint and distant 
analogy, one suggesting a better interpretation, in 
what we are wont to style the creations of genius. We 
never apply this phrase to the most marvellous dis- 
coveries in science or the most fruitful inventions in 

1 Perhaps too Bergson's elan vital is but another variant of 
this idea. 



Creation and the Originality of Genius 239 

the technical arts : nobody, I fancy, would say that 
Newton created gravitation or that Gutenberg created 
printing. If Newton had not discovered gravitation 
some one else would, and as for printing we know that 
it was invented more than once. But it is common to 
speak of such works as the Antigone of Sophocles, 
Shakespeare's Hamlet, Michael Angelo's Moses , 
Raphael's Sistine Madonna or Beethoven's Ninth 
Symphony as creations; and we feel pretty confident 
that if their authors had not produced them they would 
never have been produced. This approximation to 
the divine that we find in the originality of genius 
leads us often to speak of its ' creations ' as inspired. 
In the case of discoveries and inventions we realise 
that sense and intellect, the receptive and active factors, 
are both concerned ; but the immortal works of art, the 
things of beauty that are a joy for ever, we regard as 
rather the spontaneous output of productive imagi- 
nation, of a free spirit that embodies itself in its work, 
lives in it and loves it. Yet however much the man 
of genius loves his work and lives in it, he is still dis- 
tinct from it, still greater than it. On the other hand, 
however dependent on him is his production, though 
he knows it through and through, yet it too is distinct 
from him : from its first inception, even in the full tide 
of his activity, he feels that it is working itself out and 
sees that it is good ; in other words he finds himself 
expressed in it and he respects his work. 

Yet after all, as we have allowed, this analogy is 
very imperfect, and it is just in the important point 
where it fails that our difficulties with the idea of 
intellective intuition begin. Between what we may 



240 The Idea of Creation 

call relative creation, the origination of something re- 
latively new within the world, and the absolute creation 
of the world itself there is an impassable gulf. The 
one presupposes experience previously acquired, the 
other is coeval and identical with the divine experience 
itself. God in short is the Absolute Genius — the 
World-Genius, as he has been called. Any analogy 
drawn from our experience must then be inadequate to 
such an experience : God's ways are not as our ways 
nor his thoughts as our thoughts. But the difference 
lies simply in transcending the limit to which our 
experience points but can never attain : it need not 
imply utter disparity. We may perhaps safely assume 
that the distinction of will and presentation is appli- 
cable to the divine experience as well as to our own ; 
and also that there too they are equally inseparable. 
At any rate we cannot say that volition precedes 
presentation nor that presentation precedes volition ; 
that the subject is first nor yet that the object is ; nor 
finally that both are originally undifferentiated 1 . If so, 
we cannot then represent creation as starting with a 
blind will to create followed by a discursive selection 
of the best possible plan of creation ; nor as starting 
with a dialectic development of the only possible plan 
followed by the resolve to let it be. It is at once 'pure 
activity ' and ' original insight,' idea and deed, life and 
light. God is transcendent to it, for it is not God, but 
his utterance and manifestation ; and yet, because it is 
his utterance and because he ever sustains it, he is 
immanent in it, it is his continuous creation. 

So then at last the theist is bound to admit that 
1 Cf. Lect. ix. p. 199. 



Theism and Pluralism 



241 



this conception of God-and-the-world is beyond us : we 
can assign it no beginning and so we say it is 'eternal': 
we can find no ground for it and so we say it is the 
Absolute. At the same time we have to remember 
that the pluralisms position is no better, nay we must 
acknowledge, I think, that it is not so good. He too 
has to assume an endless regress for the world. For 
him too there is something groundless and therefore 
absolute, but it is the totality of a Many in their inter- 
action regarded as the ultimate reality. Of this plurality 
in unity he can give no account beyond saying that it 
is just this, and that it is there. As I have already said 
this position cannot — so far as I see — be charged with 
inherent inconsistency ; but it is incomplete and un- 
satisfying. A plurality of beings primarily independent 
as regards their existence and yet always mutually 
acting and reacting upon each other, an ontological 
plurality that is yet somehow a cosmological unity, 
seems clearly to suggest some ground beyond itself. 
The idea of God presents itself to meet this lack. The 
Many depend upon God for their existence though 
still dependent on each other as regards their ex- 
perience. The idea of God would then be meaningless, 
unless God were regarded as transcending the Many ; 
so there can be no talk of God as merely primus inter 
pares. On the other hand it would be equally meaning- 
less to talk of God apart from the Many. A God that 
was not a Creator, a God whose creatures had no 
independence, would not himself be really a God. 
Herein theism differs from thorough-going singularism 
or absolutism. A theism that is reached through 
pluralism can never end in an Absolute in which God 
w. 16 



242 The Idea of Creation 

and the World alike were absorbed and lost : the only 
Absolute then that we can admit is the Absolute which 
God and the World constitute. 

And yet the tendency of theism to pass over into 
singularism is notorious and we have noted it again 
and again. How may we account for this ? It follows 
partly, no doubt, from the besetting sin of speculative 
thinking to hypostatize abstractions — hence the so- 
called ' abstract monism ' or acosmism, of which 
Spinoza furnished the type. Partly it is the result 
of a religious spirit of self-abasement, self-abnegation, 
as in certain forms of Indian and Christian mysticism. 
But in large measure it is due to the difficulties in the 
idea of creation itself. We say God and the World 
constitute the Absolute ; but if God is the absolute 
ground of the World is not God alone after all the real 
Absolute ? In this question there lurks perhaps the 
error of concreting abstractions just now mentioned. 
If there were no world, God would cease to be the 
ground of it. He would still be the potential ground, 
it will be replied perhaps. But if he were only this, 
do we not require some further condition — some 
restraint to be withdrawn or some external impulse 
to supervene before the world can become actual 1 ? 
Or, if not that, are we not then driven to conceive 
God as not actually being all that it is his nature to 
be — if such an expression is allowable ? But no, the 

1 "Tis an established maxim... that an object which exists for 
any time in its full perfection without producing another, is not its 
sole cause ; but is assisted by some other principle, which pushed it 
from its state of inactivity." Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 
Green and Grose's edn, vol. i. p. 378. 



Theism and Absolutism 243 

objector may persist, if God is the absolute ground of 
the world — even granting that his creation has no 
time limits, still — the world cannot possibly, without 
ceasing to be created, share with him the title of 
Absolute. The more clearly we realise the entire 
and complete dependence that creation implies the 
more flagrantly absurd will such a claim appear. Even 
the potter may find the clay not ideally plastic; indeed 
the artistic creator at his best meets with some limi- 
tation in his material. For God there can be none, 
which is all that is meant by the phrase ' creation out 
of nothing.' 

To this we may reply : — No theist can pretend that 
the world is coordinate with God : the divine trans- 
cendence is essential to the whole theistic position. 
No theist again assumes that creation involves ex- 
ternal limitation. But the point is that if creation is 
to have any meaning it implies internal limitation. It 
is from the reality of the world that we start : if this is 
denied, the divine transcendence becomes meaningless, 
nay, God, as the ideal of the pure reason, sinks to a 
mere illusion within an illusion. On the other hand, if 
the reality of the world be admitted, then this reality 
stands over against the reality of God. God indeed 
has not been limited from without but he has limited 
himself. 

But now new difficulties emerge. Self-limitation 
seems to imply a prior state in which it was absent, 
whereas a limitation held to be permanent — as we hold 
creation to be — suggests some ultimate dualism rather 
than an ultimate unity. Such an objection is in keeping 
with our ordinary experience confined as that is to 

16—2 



244 The Idea of Creation 

temporal processes, but it is not applicable to the 
notion of an absolute ground ; as a trivial example may 
suffice to show. The sides of a triangle are independent 
of its angles only if regarded merely as lines, and yet 
they are the ground of the angles ; also in forming 
these they limit themselves in so far as they thereby 
determine their several ratios. We do not say that 
God comes into being with the world, but only that as 
ground of the world he limits himself : duality in 
unity is implied here as in all experience, but not 
dualism. 

But how, it may be asked, can self-limitation be 
involved in creation, if creation is pure activity and 
original intuition, if God is all life and all light ? How 
can God be omnipotent, as theism ordinarily assumes, 
and yet be limited ? Well, in the first place, we might 
reply, an omnipotent being that could not limit itself 
would hardly deserve the name of God; would, in fact, 
be only a directionless energy of unlimited amount. 
At the same time the Mosaic notion that God must 
needs rest from his labour and even Tertullian's bold 
assertion that his glory was the greater on this 
account, nobody nowadays, I suppose, would seriously 
defend. It is not any limitation of this sort that we 
have primarily in view, ^//determination is negation, 
that is limitation, we must say with Spinoza. But if 
God were what Hegel described Nature as being, ein 
bacchantischer Gott, der sick selbst nicht ziigelt und 
fasst, then indeed we might regard him as the Absolute 
notwithstanding possible creational vagaries, but he 
would be the absolutely Indeterminate. But God 
according to the theistic idea does not repudiate but 



Creative and Divine Limitatioit 245 

owns and respects his world, a world that is cosmic, 
not chaotic, from the first, and through which we may 
believe that one increasing purpose runs. Even men 
abide by their pledges, cherish their offspring, show 
steadfastness and consistency in their purposes, and in 
manifold other ways limit and determine themselves 
by their own deeds. By their deeds, yes ; but not by 
their dreams. We surely then cannot suppose that 
God is less earnest, less steadfast than his creatures : 
rather we regard him as without variableness or 
shadow of a turning. Again, to argue that unless the 
world is merely a divine phantasy, God is determined 
by its existence, does less than justice to the pluralisms 
position : it is from the reality of the world that we 
start. Apart from this, I must again insist, we have 
no basis for our ideal of God at all. 

There still remains of course the difficulty, which 
from the outset we have allowed to be insuperable : 
how God creates the world and thereby limits himself 
we can never understand 1 . The idea of creation, like 
the idea of God, we admit is altogether transcendent. 
But — paradoxical though it may seem — this admission 
in a sense explains and removes our difficulty. Even if 
the idea of creation be valid, we must necessarily fail 
to understand the process, just because that cannot fall 
within our experience ; on the other hand any process 
that we could understand could not be the creative pro- 
cess, because it would fall within our experience. This 
may sound very like a final surrender ; for what, it may 
be urged, is the use of a hypothesis that can never be 
directly verified ? Nevertheless this objection rests on 
1 See Supplementary Note II. 



246 The Idea of Creation 

a complete failure to understand the function of philo- 
sophy. A scientific hypothesis is directly verifiable ; 
because the facts which it is framed to unify, simplify, 
or explain, fall within experience, and this is sure 
therefore sooner or later to furnish a crucial test of its 
validity. But philosophy is not science — though it is 
bound to be systematic and methodical — for it deals 
not with parts or aspects of experience in isolation but 
with experience as a concrete whole. To this whole 
it must appeal to justify its ' ideas ' ; and they are 
justified in proportion as they enable us to conceive 
this whole as a complete and systematic unity. The 
pluralist halts at the Many and their interaction : he 
declines to go further because he finds no direct 
warrant for so doing. But if the idea of creation will 
carry us further, and if nothing else will, then that 
idea, it is maintained, is rationally justified though it 
be not empirically verified. 



LECTURE XII. 

THE COSMOLOGY OF THEISM. 

The idea of creation, we have allowed, must in 
any case lead to modifications of the pluralistic Welt- 
anschauung. But it is questionable if these modifications 
need to be as radical as most theists assume. To these 
differences and their possible reconciliation we have 
now to turn. 

Pluralism and theism are — nowadays at all events — 
both monistic : for neither, is the distinction between 
person and thing, matter and mind, an ultimate dis- 
tinction. For both alike, material phenomena are only 
the manifestation of minds, of so-called ' things per se! 
These however are not literally things at all, but 
beings that are beings for themselves, i.e. — in the widest 
sense of the term — persons, who are conative and 
cognitive in varying degrees. But whereas pluralism 
regards all material phenomena as due to the direct 
interaction of such persons or monads, reduces the 
entire course of the world, in short, without reservation, 
to such interaction ; theism usually attributes material 
phenomena to the direct and orderly intervention of 
God, who in this way provides a medium and instru- 
mentality for the mutual intercourse and understanding 
of his creatures. Of the former position we have taken 



248 The Cosmology of Theism 

the Leibnizian monadology as the type, discarding 
however the doctrine of ' pre-established harmony,' as 
Wolf and others did, who attempted to systematise 
Leibniz's philosophy. Of the latter position we have 
typical instances in the occasionalism of Berkeley or of 
Lotze in his later views ; they agree in referring matter 
or the so-called mechanism of nature to the immanent 
activity of God himself. Such theism then, it will be 
readily seen, assumes two apparently quite distinct 
forms of divine activity: first, the creative and sustaining 
activity, whereby the finite Many exist, and secondly 
the continuous mediation whereby they are brought 
into living relation with each other. In proceeding 
then to examine what we might call the Cosmology of 
theism, the general theory of occasionalism comes up 
for consideration first of all. 

This theory, originated to bridge over the gulf that 
the Cartesian dualism had made between mind and 
matter, contributed in the end to that denial of the in- 
dependent reality of matter altogether, which is common 
to all forms of spiritualistic monism or idealism and 
was in fact implicit in the teaching of Descartes himself. 
At first all that was asserted was, that since the utter 
disparateness of matter and mind rendered any direct 
influence of one on the other impossible, their seeming 
interaction must be due solely to the ' assistance ' or 
intervention of the Creator of both. It was however 
still assumed that bodies causally and immediately 
affected each other. But as the consequences of the 
entire inertness assigned to matter came to be realised, 
and our own voluntary activity came to be regarded 
as the prime source of our sense of power, the theory 



Occasionalism 249 

of occasionalism underwent a corresponding change. 
The idea of God as mediating between mind and 
matter gave place to the simpler idea of God as 
mediating between finite minds, the so-called material 
world being regarded no longer as the means by which 
this mediation was effected, but rather as the actual 
fact of this mediation itself. This is the form of 
occasionalism that was maintained by Berkeley and 
Lotze. This also we find already in germ within 
Descartes' own system 1 ; and it was so far developed 
by the Cartesian Malebranche that a disciple of his, 
Arthur Collier, is said by his biographer to have 
anticipated the Berkeleian position by several years 2 . 

At the outset too, as its name suggests, occasionalism 
implied the continuous interposition of the Deity in 
each and all of the innumerable cases of apparent 
interaction ceaselessly occurring throughout the entire 
universe. Against such a view Leibniz brought the 
charge of perpetual miracle, of irrational recourse to 
a Deus ex machina ; and the objection is commonly 
regarded as fatal. Well, no doubt intervention in the 
affairs of a multitude of distinct and unique beings 
does for us imply a corresponding multiplicity of 
separate acts ; and the thought of such a multiplex — 
so to say discursive — intervention is to us utterly 
bewildering. But for God, who is to be conceived as 
omniscient, the case is altogether different. For God, 
as its common Creator, the world is one whole : how- 
ever much differentiated, it never for him loses its 
meaning and therefore never lacks its intuited unity. 

1 Cf. e.g. his sixth Meditation. 

2 Cf. Fraser's edition of Berkeley's Works, ist edn, vol. r. p. 253. 



250 The Cosmology of Theism 

For God there is no exclusive standpoint and there- 
fore no need to hurry hither and thither, attending 
now to this, now to that. Further, since continuity 
is the common characteristic of the growth and de- 
velopment of all his creatures alike 1 , his compensatory 
adjustments, the supposed means of their interaction, 
will also be continuous and orderly. They may exhibit 
the regularity of increasing purpose rather than the 
rigidity of fixed mechanism, but at least they will be 
compatible with the idea of Law, of orderly control. 

But to talk of a Deus ex machina in such a case is 
to assume that there is some independent system to 
get tangled up into knots, to forget that Nature for 
the theist just is this continuous mediation of the 
Divine and not a mechanism independent of it. Again 
to call this a perpetual miracle, if that means more than 
a subject for perpetual wonder and admiration, is equally 
absurd. The fact is that Leibniz's own theory of 
pre-established harmony does not differ so much from 
occasionalism as is often supposed. Bayle pointed 
this out long ago and the resemblance has often been 

J 1 Thus it cannot be objected that a man might, for example, 
will to fly, and that therefore there could be no orderliness in the 
world if God simply gave effect to whatever might be willed. In 
truth, however, a man cannot will to fly, and the mere wish to fly 
entails no change of attitude, no actual conation. Still he might 
possibly try to fly ; but then his first attempt would start from his 
status quo. But what can a finite being will to do, more generally 
what is such a being always striving for ? For self-conservation and 
self-betterment, we say ; but this again carries us back to the status 
quo. There will then be a certain continuity in the actions of each 
and all such beings, and so there will also be a corresponding 
continuity in that mediating activity of God which we ordinarily 
summarise as the uniformity of Nature. Natura non facit saltus. 



Leibniz on Occasionalism 251 

noticed since. If we figure to ourselves two badly- 
made clocks (' horloges me'chantes'), and imagine the 
clockmaker continually interfering to correct their 
faulty adjustment — and this is Leibniz's caricature of 
occasionalism — then indeed the objection to miraculous 
meddling would be in place. But the whole point is 
that there are not two clocks. To call Nature — the 
only clock there is, if there is a clock at all — a perpetual 
miracle is to ignore the fact that a permanent miracle 
is a contradiction in terms. For theism, when it is 
thought out, there is however not even one clock : to 
attribute to God the need or even the use of organs or 
instruments is but childish anthropomorphism 1 . "II 
n'y a point d'autre nature, je veux dire d'autres lois 
naturelles, que les volontes efficaces du tout-puissant," 
said Malebranche. 

Nevertheless the term occasionalism will always 
tend to suggest the part played by a broker, middleman 
or ' go-between ' in human affairs ; and this, it will be 
felt, is no worthy role to assign to the divine being. 
And yet such an objection is due simply to misunder- 
standing. It would be just as reasonable to maintain 
that to create finite beings at all is unworthy of the 
Infinite. So long as creation vU elies mediation — and 
this is the usual theistic position — the two activities, 
however distinct, are in fact inseparable, the one being 
consequential on the other, and both together resulting 
in one complete cosmos. We find the life and inter- 
course of finite beings to depend on two things, first 
on their organisms, and secondly on their environments : 
these together make up the one whole we commonly 
1 Cf. Naturalism and Agnosticism, 3rd edn, vol. II. pp. 274 f. 



252 The Cosmology of Theism 

speak of as the physical or material world. And so in 
virtue of the continuity between any given organism 
and its environment — that is, eventually, the whole 
material world — we may regard this as itself the 
organism common to all living things alike, the uni- 
versal matrix within which their several individual 
organisms are differentiated but not separated. Again, 
as the several individual organisms, as the very term 
itself implies, constitute the instrumentality of the 
sentient agents or persons to whom they belong ; so 
we may say that the entire material world is in like 
manner the common possession or medium of life and 
intercourse for them, the only truly active beings. 
According to the cosmology of theism, in short, the 
physical world is simply a system of means provided 
for the sake of the realm of ends : it is only to be 
understood as subservient to them, and apart from 
them is alike meaningless and worthless. 

But though the existence of the material world is 
not dependent on us but is rather on this view the 
medium on which we ourselves depend, though it is 
indispensable as a system of means for us, we cannot 
from this conclude that it is in the same sense indis- 
pensable for God. W^. are not, in other words, justified 
in assuming that the realm of ends is created conform- 
ably to a prior system of means, life being primarily 
adjusted to matter, not matter to life. The creations 
of finite minds are, it is true, subject to material 
trammels, the exigencies of rhyme and metre, the 
small range of luminosity in pigments, the intractable 
nature of marble or bronze, and so forth. But we 
cannot suppose either that the divine creation is 



Creative and Mediating Activity 253 

necessarily beset by limits of this kind or that God has 
arbitrarily limited the world of living forms by a 
pre-ordained world of lifeless stuff. The creative 
activity is then, the theist holds, only the condition of, 
not at all conditioned by, the mediating activity ; and 
the unity and purpose of the former as a realm of ends 
involves and determines the law and order of the 
latter as a system of means. 

But do we need thus to distinguish between ends 
and means, between creative activity and mediating 
activity ? Does the idea of creation necessarily imply 
what we may call a unified and systematic occasionalism? 
If the interpretation of interaction towards which 
pluralism seems to tend is possible and sufficient, we 
certainly may answer this question in the negative. 
There may, in fact, be such a divine system or economy 
embracing and encircling the living agents of the world, 
furnishing, as it were, the properties and the scenery 
in which these dramatis personae of history enact their 
parts. Such subsidiary aids, I say, may exist, but 
according to the pluralist view they are not necessary. 
But can the pluralist position be thought out ? Why 
can it not, it may be replied, if it requires nothing 
more than the sort of mutual understanding or rapport 
which we daily observe in the personal intercourse of 
our fellow-men ? " As in water face answereth to face 
so the heart of man to man." Of course such mutual 
understanding is approximately complete only between 
persons similarly situated and similar in their interests 
and pursuits, who can thus become — as we aptly say — 
intimate with each other. It tails off rapidly in our 
intercourse with strangers, and tends to dwindle away 



254 The Cosmology of Theism 

altogether as we pass to creatures further and further 
removed from us in the scale of being. You may train 
a dog to fetch and carry, but it is useless to tell a fly 
not to settle on your nose : like Milton's mariner dis- 
embarking on the leviathan's back, he takes you to be 
terra firma. Yet the flies understand each other and 
glide about in airy mazes without colliding. 

But it will be said, both flies and men have 
organisms, and without these their mutual adjustments 
of behaviour would be altogether inexplicable, and it is 
just this interaction by means of physical organization 
that is the problem 1 . This is true and the pluralist is 
fully aware of it. It was Leibniz himself, the founder 
of modern pluralism, who said that "a disembodied 
soul would be a deserter from the general order, which 
implies matter and movement and their laws 2 ." But 
the question is: What is matter? More exactly stated : 
What is the simplest concept of matter to which we 
are led, setting out from the realm of ends as the reason 
of its existence ? We note then, first, that for Leibniz, 
as for his modern successors, any given organism itself 
consists of organisms, which for it are organs, having 
special functions and working consentiently together 
as members of this one whole. This however implies 
an indefinite — Leibniz even said, an infinite — regress. 
But for the modern pluralist all it means, I take it, is 
that we cannot assume any given organism that seems 
simple, to be so really ; but that, none the less, since 
the complex involves the simple, bare — or as Leibniz 
called them, naked — monads must exist. And now 

1 See Supplementary Note III. 

2 Cf. Philosophische Schriften, Gerhardt's edn, vol. vi. p. 546. 



What is the simplest concept of Matter? 255 

how are we to conceive such a bare monad ? It cannot 
be a dominant monad, for this would imply subordinate 
monads : it cannot therefore have a body distinct from 
itself. In some sense then, it would seem, it must 
be its own body or disappear altogether from the 
universal connexion of things. But we must not 
understand this to mean that apparently all mental 
characteristics are gone and only material characteristics 
are left. The true solution seems rather to be that we 
have reached the limit of both. The physical concept 
of such a limit is the dynamical concept of a mass-point 
as a centre of force. The corresponding psychological 
concept answers to what Leibniz happily described as 
mens momentanea seu carens recordatione 1 . 

Some elucidation of both these concepts is requisite 
before we can attempt to formulate the conclusion to 
which this regress points. Leibniz spoke of monads 
generally as "the real atoms of nature, and in a word, 
the elements of things." Such language, which seems 
specially appropriate to his naked monads, should be 
sufficient to put us on our guard against identifying 
them with the mass-points of the modern physicist — 
which Leibniz held to be only phenomenal. They 
are more analogous to Boscovich's centres of force 2 : 

1 Theoriae motus abstracti Defi?iitiones, Gerhardt's edition of his 
philosophical works, vol. iv. p. 230. 

2 It is worthy of remark, that notwithstanding this analogy, to 
which Boscovich himself refers, he was so far from identifying 
monads and centres of force as to maintain that the 'seat of the 
soul' is more or less extended. Cf. his Philosophiae naturalis Theoria, 
Venice, 1763, Appendix, De A?tima et Deo, §§ 536 ff. It is also 
worthy of passing notice that it was through Boscovich that Priestley 
was led to his so-called materialism. 



256 The Cosmology of Theism 

although they differ from these in being all qualitatively 
distinct, or unique, like Herbart's reals, not all qualita- 
tively the same, as Boscovich's elements were 1 . But 
they resemble these in another respect and that a very 
important one. Boscovich conceived his simple atoms 
as acting at a distance, which — paradoxical though it 
sounds — really means interacting directly without any 
intervening medium, doing, in fact, what according 
to the Newtonian mechanics is inconceivable. This 
immediacy of interaction is held to characterize the 
bare monad of the modern pluralist, the monad that is, 
so to say, its own body. Such interaction implies what 
Lotze called a sympathetic rapport. 

This brings us to the psychical nature of the bare 
monad, and here again immediacy is the thing we have 
specially to note. This immediacy answers to what 
psychologists now call pure sensation, an ideal limit to 
which our simplest experiences never descend : our 
sensations correspond rather to complexes or syntheses 
of the elemental sensations or ' petites perceptions ' of 
Leibniz. Moreover, for us it is true that all cognition 
is recognition, implies assimilation, and therefore 
memory in the widest sense, i.e. the retention of what 
has been either inherited or acquired. Pure sensation 
or cognition is the ' momentary consciousness ' of some 
datum, the perception or recognition of which, on the 
other hand, would presuppose previous experiences 
that still in some sense endure. Clear evidence of 
such a ' psychical ' or enduring present is only found in 
connexion with comparatively complex organisms, and 

1 Cf. op. cit. § 3, quoted also by Fechner, Atomenlehre, 2nd edn, 
p. 240. 



Interaction as 'sympathetic rapport' 257 

this range in time is found also to increase as the 
biological differentiation of the organism increases. 
When then, on the contrary, we imagine this complexity 
decreased without limit, we reach the concept of the 
bare monad whose organism, so to say, reduces to a 
point, and its present to a moment ; which can only 
react immediately and to what is immediately given. 
In other words such monads deal only with their 
environment and, so long as they gain nothing by 
experience, so long, that is, as they remain bare 
monads, they severally deal with it always in the same 
way. The existence of an indefinite number of such 
monads would provide all the ' uniform medium ' for 
the intercourse of higher monads that these can require, 
without any need for such divine intervention as 
occasionalism assumes. 

The precise details of this psychical intercourse the 
pampsychist is unable to specify. But it is questionable 
whether — notwithstanding this — the occasionalist with 
his apparent psychophysical interaction is not in a 
worse position ; for he only dispenses with the need 
for any specification by assuming what we may call 
a 'dualism' in the divine activity, and that to many 
minds will always appear too cumbrous and, so to say, 
unscientific, to be intellectually satisfactory. And after 
all the main outline of the pampsychic alternative can 
be clearly stated. The relation of a dominant monad 
(A) to any monad of its organism (or of its brain, when 
its organism is so far differentiated,) is different in kind 
from the relation to the same monad of the dominant 
monad (B) of another organism. The one relation we 
may call an internal, functional, or vital, the other an 

w. 17 



258 The Cosmology of Theism 

external, foreign, or physical, relation. The totality of 
these internal relations at a given time answers to As 
objective experience at that moment. Certain changes 
in this whole are, so far as A is concerned, initiated 
by certain of the subordinate monads : these changes 
answer to A's sensations, and as to these it is receptive 
or passive. Certain other changes, on the other hand, 
are due to A's active initiative : these entail sensations 
in certain subordinate monads, and their response is 
what we call A's movement 1 . 

But the monads of A's organism are not, we have 
said, related exclusively to it and to each other. If 
that were the case, the organism would fail altogether 
of its purpose and meaning : its existence at all would 
be inexplicable, unless it were an absolute whole and 
self-maintaining. In fact, however, these subordinate 
monads are related also to the environment, which we 
have called the common organism or matrix of all 
monads. This in the last resort is conceived as con- 
sisting of bare monads, which have only external 
relations to one another, or rather for which, as the limit 
of our regress, the distinction of internal and external 
ceases to hold. What is true of A's organism is true 
also of B's, and so we can understand how A's acts 
may give rise to sensations in B through this double 
mediation of organism and environment and how B's 
acts in turn may give rise to sensations in A. Presently 
as like sensations (or recepts) recur they become 
gradually more and more assimilated with previous 
experiences of them and the advance to definite percepts 

1 See Supplementary Note III. 



Organism and Environment 259 

is made. What were originally only immediate sensory 
data have now a meaning 1 ; A and B, that is to say, 
are en rapport. Pari passu with advancing experience 
we find also increasing complexity of organization : 
functions originally controlled by the dominant monad 
then devolve upon subordinate organisms or organs, 
and so habitual or secondarily automatic processes, 
which for the dominant monad lapse into subconscious- 
ness, arise and extend. Thus the process of mediation, 
once begun, tends continually to increase ; and so, as 
the range of an individual's experience extends, he 
knows more and more of the external world, and yet is 
ever further removed from that immediate relation with 
it which psychologists call pure sensation. 

Both the pampsychist and the occasionalist alike 
agree, as we have seen, in holding all real existence to 
consist in experients and their experience ; they agree 
too, we may assume, in accepting the current psycho- 
logical analysis of experience into presentation, feeling 
and action. But in interpreting presentations as sub- 
jective modifications, assumed to be due directly to the 
divine activity, occasionalism becomes hampered with 
all the epistemological difficulties of what is known as 
subjective idealism, difficulties which made the exist- 
ence of the external world such a hopeless problem for 
modern philosophers till Reid began to clear the way 
by his criticism of the Cartesian ' theory of ideas.' 

1 Thanks to the 'creative synthesis' which the processes of 
recognition and perception imply. (Cf. Lect. v. pp. 104 f.) But 
in so far as they affect their subject even bare sensations always have 
a meaning, i.e. a value as pleasurable or painful. This is ' meaning ' 
in a most vital sense. 

17 — 2 



260 The Cosmology of Theism 

Leibniz's famous paradox that, although they mirror 
the universe, the monads have no windows, is but 
another way of stating this theory. Modern pluralists 
on the other hand maintain that all monads have 
windows — more literally stated, that presentation is a 
relation among monads not a subjective state in a 
single monad. And this ' natural realism,' as Hamilton 
called it 1 , is so much the simpler hypothesis — if that 
can be called a hypothesis which claims to be the bare 
statement of the facts — that we may say with some con- 
fidence that occasionalism would never have been heard 
of but for the Cartesian dualism of matter and mind 
and the Cartesian theory of ideas as subjective states. 
That God should have created the monads without 
windows and taken on himself the function of supplying 
their place — whether continuously, as the occasionalists 
assumed, or once for all, as Leibniz held — seems then 
a needless complication. 

Nevertheless, since we cannot actually verify the 
indefinite regress which the existence of bare monads 
implies, and since we cannot show that the indirect 
mediation of our finite intercourse is not a fact, we have 
no means of deciding empirically between the two 
alternatives. The most we can say is that the pluralist 
alternative is the prior as well as the simpler, and it 
seems adequate. To the objection that it reduces 
theism to the level of mere deism and leaves the world 
once started to go of itself, it is sufficient to reply that 
this supposed tenet of deism is really inconceivable. 
As we have already seen, the idea of creation by simple 

1 Albeit in his own version of it he halts and trims in very 
half-hearted fashion. 



Pampsychism and Theism 261 

' fiat ' at a definite epoch will not work ; but deism on 
any other view is reduced to atheism. If there is a 
Creator at all he can never stand aside and wholly 
apart from his world. As Lotze has well said, such a 
proceeding " is intelligible in a human artificer who 
leaves his work when it is finished and trusts for its 
maintenance to universal laws of Nature, laws which 
he did not himself make, and which not he, but another 
for him, maintains in operation"; but "the picture of 
God withdrawing from the world," the sole ground of 
which is himself, is incomprehensible 1 . 

But, it may be urged further, the sense-symbolism 
of Berkeley serves not only as a medium of intercourse 
for God's sentient creatures but it is also at the same 
time a revelation of God himself, is the language 
wherein he addresses us 2 . Granted that as an in- 
dependent argument the appeal to the teleology of 
Nature is not decisive, still if there is a Creator, as we 
are now assuming, he must surely somehow manifest 
himself. But may we not reply : Surely if there is a 
Creator, the world of his interacting creatures will itself 
be a clearer manifestation of him than a mere medium 
of intercourse, alike available for very diverse ends and 
alike indifferent to all ? The two seem to stand in 

1 But the ascription of such a tenet to deists generally — to the 
English deists of the 18th century, for example — is a grievous 
misrepresentation. What they denied was not the divine immanence 
in toto, but only such occasionalistic interference as miracles, special 
revelations and special providences imply. They were in fact what we 
should now call rationalistic theists. 

2 Physical catastrophes are a serious difficulty for the theist on 
this view. Cf. a striking article by Professor Howison, 'Catastrophes 
and the Moral Order,' Hibbert Journal, vol. I. 1902, pp. 114-121. 



262 The Cosmology of Theism 

much the same position as grammar to literature. 
Accordingly the theists who set out by distinguishing 
the realm of Nature from the realm of Ends allow that 
it is the latter that reveals God the more clearly and 
impressively. If so, the case for theism can hardly be 
impaired should this distinction turn out to be unneces- 
sary. But after all, it will be rejoined, your analogy 
between language and literature is rather unfortunate, 
since literature presupposes language. In the abstract 
perhaps it does, but not in actual fact, in so far as 
all utterance has some meaning. It is precisely the 
absolute distinction of means and ends that is denied. 
So far then we seem entitled to conclude that while 
both alternatives are compatible with theism the 
thorough-going pampsychism of the pluralist which 
dispenses with a distinct medium of intercourse is, as 
simpler, so far preferable to occasionalism for which a 
mediating activity is essential. 

But as yet we have considered mainly the structural 
or, as the favourite phrase used to be, the statical 
aspect of the world : let us now turn to consider more 
directly its functional or dynamical aspect. Here 
again the pampsychical or Leibnizian seems preferable 
to the occasionalistic alternative. We must in any 
case admit that what we commonly call inorganic or 
physical processes precede and underlie those which 
all alike recognise as the processes in which life and 
mind are undoubtedly manifest. We must, that is to 
say, acknowledge that Nature is die Vorstufe des 
Geistes, the prelude to Mind, in so far as so-called 
physical processes invariably introduce those that are 
distinctly psychical. If so, then, when life and mind 



N attire as ' the prelude to Mind" 263 

appear, have we not a break in the course of evolution 
— have we not that generatio cequivoca of something 
wholly new, to which the most infelicitous name imagin- 
able is often given, viz. 'the spontaneous generation' 
of the living by the lifeless ? But this naturalistic 
assumption is rejected by the theists who accept the 
occasionalistic distinction between nature and spirit. 
" I should certainly never," says Lotze, " set any one 
the task out of ten elements to make an eleventh arise 
equally real with them " — a curious understatement, by 
the way, of the enormous assumption involved in the 
naturalistic theory of life. " It is not from them" — 
the inorganic elements, Lotze continues, "that... the 
substance of the soul would spring ; nor would it arise 
above them or between them, or by the side of them, 
out of nothing. It would be a new creature, produced 
by the one encompassing Being from its own nature as 
the supplement of its physical activity there and then 
operating 1 " In thus speaking of the Absolute as 
"giving to every organism its fitting soul" Lotze 
seems to invert our ordinary notions of the relation of 
the two in the very way to which we had just now to 
object 2 . We do not talk of fitting inhabitants to their 
houses but of fitting houses to their inhabitants. Lotze's 
language reminds one of Herbert Spencer's view that 
when the organism becomes too complex to work 
automatically consciousness comes to its rescue. Yet 
Lotze was perfectly clear as to the relative importance 
of the two, as the following sentence may suffice to 
show : "Nor again is it out of nothing that the soul 
is created...; but to satisfy the phantasy we may say, 
1 Metaphysic, % 251 fin. Italics mine. 2 Cf. above, p. 252. 



264 The Cosmology of Theism 

it is from itself, from its own real nature, that the 
Absolute sets free (entldsst) the soul, and so adds to its 
one activity, the course of nature, that other which, 
according to the prescriptive meaning of the Absolute, 
is its completion 1 ." 

Now for the downright dualist, who ascribes reality 
to matter and to mind alike, this priority of the course 
of nature to the evolution of life and mind, which it 
somehow helps to bring about, is conceivable at the 
outset at any rate; and it is moreover what facts them- 
selves in the first instance suggest. That such dualism 
turns out to be eventually an unworkable hypothesis is 
in the meantime nothing to the point. But for the 
monist — who is aware of the impasse to which dualism 
leads and who is therefore prepared to recognise in the 
so-called course of nature, as distinct from the realm of 
ends, "only a system -of occasions or means for pro- 
ducing presentations in spiritual beings 2 " — for the 
monist, I say, to suppose nevertheless that this system 
is maintained by the divine activity, when as yet there 
are no spiritual subjects to benefit by it ; nay, to sup- 
pose further that this system is actually itself not so 
much a means adapted to them but rather a means 
to which they are adapted — surely this is a vcrrepov 
TTporepov not easy to match. It seems to imply a need 
for instrumentality, which — as I have already said — 
contradicts the whole notion of a Creator. May we 
not then conclude that when in Hegelian fashion 
people talk of die Natur als Vorstufe des Geistes, what 
is meant is not that there is a breach of evolutional 
continuity but simply that the level of ^^-conscious 
1 Op. cit. § 246 fin. 2 Lotze, op. cit. § 97. 



The Evolutional Regress 265 

existence, of Spirit in the narrower sense, is reached 
continuously by development through earlier stages 
of more or less conscious life ? 

The question then which we have next to raise 
concerns what in an earlier lecture was called the 
lower limit of pluralism : in other words : What do we 
ultimately reach when we try to trace the process of 
evolution backwards ? And our chief concern will 
now be to ascertain, if we can, the theistic interpretation 
of this initial situation or ideal limit, to which we 
attempt to regress. Herbert Spencer, it will be re- 
membered, maintained that what we should ultimately 
reach would be a state of homogeneity and that from 
such a state, in consequence of its essential instability, 
all the heterogeneity that we now find has been 
gradually evolved. And, on the supposition that 
evolution will explain everything, he reasoned correctly 
enough ; for, since what we now observe is continually 
increasing heterogeneity, this seems fairly to suggest 
an original state in which there was no heterogeneity 
at all. Leibniz and the modern pluralists on the other 
hand, as we know, while admitting homogeneity in so 
far as no two monads are altogether different, yet con- 
tend for the presence of heterogeneity throughout : no 
two monads or ' reals,' according to them, are or ever 
were altogether alike. If now we try to imagine all 
these in their initial condition we seem to reach a world 
of bare monads, since all the processes of organization 
fall within the scope of evolution, not of origin. But 
bare monads, we have seen, are described as having 
only a momentary consciousness without memory and 
as so far incapable of acquiring by experience : how then 



266 The Cosmology of Theism 

from such an initial condition can the evolution of 
experience ever begin ? Can the bare monad acquire 
experience ? 

The pluralist, like Herbert Spencer, starts with a 
certain initial instability. But he gives a better account 
of it : describing it not in terms of matter but in terms 
of mind. Even his bare monads are conative, that is 
are feeling and striving subjects or persons in the 
widest sense, not inert particles or things. Even so it 
would be conceivable, of course, that every one existed 
in a certain neutral state that called for no efforts of 
self-conservation ; and then, unless we could credit 
some at least with impulses towards self-betterment, 
nothing would happen. Anyhow, as a matter of fact, 
some things have happened. In the course of these 
changes, it is assumed that certain monads come into 
relations that, as mutually helpful, they tend to main- 
tain. At the same time to this comparative intimacy 
within a group there corresponds a comparative 
differentiation — for each member of it — between such 
j group and the world of monads at large; and with this 
differentiation within the present there arises pari 
passu an increase in its duration as conscious present ; 
so change is perceived, and plasticity tends to become 
memory. It is needless to reproduce in further detail 
the pluralistic Weltanschauung, which I have attempted 
to describe in earlier lectures : what now interests us 
is the interpretation or modification that theism has to 
impose. 

But first it will be well to recall what theism as 
such in any case implies, viz. that the initial state, from 
which pluralism seeks to start as a fact, finds in God 



God as the 'Beginning' 267 

its ground and reason. The bare existence of reality 
in the plural, it may be argued, seems no more to 
demand a ground than its bare existence in the singular. 
But when the Many, regarded as existentially inde- 
pendent, are found to be mutually complementary, 
conspiring together to realise an intelligible organic 
whole, then the presence from the first of an underlying 
unity suggests itself. Why should the Many tend to- 
wards one end unless they had in the One their source ? 
Otherwise, the further we attempt to regress must 
we not allow that the more inconceivable a supreme 
end becomes 1 ? Those who decline to accept theism 
may either leave such questions unanswered, main- 
taining that for the world's evolution as ultimate there 
can be no sufficient reason other than the fact itself ; 
or they may fall back on an Absolute in which the dis- 
tinction of God and world disappears. The former of 
these alternatives ignores two things : that we as rational 
beings are part of the world's evolution, and that the 
demand for a sufficient reason is thus a demand that 
the world itself has raised. The latter reduces the 
world to an inexplicable appearance which, somehow 
seeming to be there, it can only explain away. 

There is indeed another possible course, viz. to 
deny that things show any tendency towards the 
realisation of an organic whole or that the world is a 
single realm of ends at all. Chance, it may be said, 
would suffice to account for all the mutual compati- 
bility that we find : in a manifold of indefinite extent we 
might expect indefinitely many coincidences. In such 
a supposition there is a covert appeal to the unknown 
1 Cf. Lect. ix. p. 197. 



268 The Cosmology of Theism 

that is specially out of place in such ultra-radical 
empiricism. In the world that we know there is, as the 
pluralist himself assumes, that amount of unity which 
every plurality in order to be known necessarily in- 
volves. This world, moreover, in the course of its 
development has already advanced some way towards 
what we have called a higher unity, and at the stage of 
self-conscious reason has adopted this unity as its ideal 
goal. For these facts the theistic hypothesis furnishes 
an adequate explanation and so far no other or better 
is known or even wanted. We may then resume our 
inquiry : how does theism interpret that lower limit, 
towards which the pluralist attempts to trace all evo- 
lution back ? 

There can be no doubt, I think, that the hypothesis 
of evolution was foreign at any rate to modern theories 
of creation. Thus we find even the deist Voltaire 
preferred to account for the fossil shells found on 
mountain slopes by the passage of pilgrims who 
dropped them there, rather than admit the theories of 
the new science of geology. " Nothing of all that 
vegetates, nothing of all that is animated," he wrote, 
" has changed : all species have remained invariably 
the same : it would indeed be strange that the grain 
of millet should have conserved its nature eternally and 
that the nature of the entire globe should have varied 1 ." 
But nowadays theism professes to accept the evolution 
hypothesis. To accept it, but in what sense ? Only I 
fear in the literal and original sense of merely unfolding 
what is there all along, not in the scientific sense of 
epigenesis or creative synthesis, described in an earlier 
1 Les Principes de la Philosophic, vol. in. § 45. 



Theism and Rpigenesis 269 

lecture. If so, all the difference there would be between 
creation without evolution and creation with it would 
be in the method not in the result ; it would be such 
a difference as, to take a simple example, there is 
between starting with a binomial, say (a + 5) 2 , and 
starting with its expansion a? + 2ab + 6 2 . Creation in 
either case must be through and through determinate 
and complete, embracing both all that is and all that 
happens ; only in one case its content would at first be 
explicit, in the other only implicit. Thus we have 
found Hegel saying : " The history of the world is the 
exhibition (Darstellung) how spirit comes to the con- 
sciousness of what in itself it means ; and as the seed 
carries in itself the whole nature of the tree, ...so too 
the first traces of spirit virtually contain the whole of 
history 1 ." This is the literal evolution in which every- 
thing is predetermined if not foreordained, a drama of 
which the book of final judgment constitutes the play 
and the history of the world just its representation 
(Darstellung), as the astronomer-poet of Persia had 
said centuries before Hegel was born. Up to this 
point the reconciliation of pluralism and theism seemed 
possible, but here the disagreement threatens to be 
radical : an evolution that is essentially dialectical 
demands more than pluralism, resting on the prima 
facie evidence of experience, can accept ; while evolution 
as epigenesis seems even more clearly to conflict with 
the ideas of theism generally current. We come in 
fact upon the old problem of ' fixed fate, free-will, fore- 
knowledge absolute ' : intractable as it has proved we 
must needs try to discuss this problem with open minds. 
1 Cf. above, Lect. v. p. ioo. 



LECTURE XIII. 



FREEDOM. 



In our endeavour to reconcile or combine pluralism 
and theism we have reached a point at which they 
seem hopelessly to diverge, viz., in the interpretation 
of evolution. For theism, as ordinarily understood, 
evolution is literally the mere unfolding or expansion 
of what is implicitly present from the first : in creating 
the world God is held to know and ordain all that 
from our temporal standpoint is yet to be. The theist 
is not content with saying that not a sparrow now falls 
to the ground without God knowing it, but he insists 
that the very hairs of our heads were eternally num- 
bered by divine ordination. Creation in reality is once 
for all and for ever complete : it is not only a totum 
simul but it is a totum sempiterne : a nunc stans in which 
all the past and all the future alike eternally exist. 
For us who move through it there is change ; but for 
God, who is omnipresent in what we call time as well 
as in what we call space, and who therefore does not 
move and is not moved, for him there is no change. 

To the pluralist on the other hand, as we have 
seen, the so-called evolution of the world is really 
epigenesis, creative synthesis ; it implies continual new 
beginnings, the result of the mutual conflict and co- 



Creatures as Creators 271 

operation of agents, all of whom, though in varying 
degrees, act spontaneously or freely. For the pluralist, 
in short, these agents are themselves creative ; and if 
they were not they could never come to entertain the 
idea that they are creatures too. God may have made 
man in his own image, but it is from the image that 
men reason back to God as their maker. But the 
notion of making, the potter notion, is anything but 
apposite, and the pluralist will have none of it. God's 
creatures are not manufactured articles, and if we must 
have a figure to represent what utterly transcends us, 
that of generating the living is far apter than that of 
kneading clay. Singularist philosophers are fond of 
speaking of the world as the differentiation of the 
Absolute. But if this Absolute be verily spirit, then 
its differentiation into conscious automata, now pleased, 
now pained, by their pre-established movements, must 
strike us, however wonderful, as still but a very poor 
performance. If this Absolute be not spirit, then it 
may possibly correspond to the union of spirits, but in 
that case to call spirits its differentiations would be 
almost meaningless. " Unless creators are created" 
says one impassioned pluralist, " nothing is really 
created 1 ." The pluralist then may allow that God is 
the sole ground of there being a • world to evolve, but 
he cannot admit that God, as many theists maintain, 
determined 'before the foundation of the world' every- 
thing that shall ever be done in it : for then nothing 
would verily be done in it at all. But it was not till 
deeds were done that men talked of fate ; then, falsely 
projecting the fixity of the past into the future and 
1 Howison, The Conception of God, 1902, p. 97. 



272 Freedom 

thence reflecting it back again, they denied the very 
source of the idea of fate itself by denying real freedom 
or personal initiative altogether. 

But quite apart from the difficulty of reconciling 
finite freedom with divine foreknowledge, the reality 
of true self-determination is questioned on more em- 
pirical grounds. It is obvious then that this question 
concerning the so-called ' freedom of the will ' must 
engage our attention first of all. This phrase, freedom 
of the will, however, is a very misleading one : Locke 
long ago protested against it, and we shall do well, as 
far as possible, to avoid it ; though it is so firmly estab- 
lished in common thought that its complete elimination 
from controversy is hardly practicable. And yet it 
will not be denied that whenever we talk of freedom 
or liberty, we always — unless these words are meta- 
phorically used — refer to a person or persons. Again 
it will not be denied that by will we mean not a person 
but a faculty or power that is attributed to a person. 
Finally it will not be denied that this concept of a 
power or faculty called will — like all such concepts — 
is but a generalisation based on actual instances of 
volitions or acts of willing. There is thus no will that 
wills but only a person or subject that wills. To quote 
Locke : "We may as properly say that it is the singing 
faculty sings, and the dancing faculty dances, as that 
the will chooses 1 ." The real question then is what is 
meant when it is asserted or denied that in willing a 
man is free ? 

Again this question is not clearly stated when de- 
scribed, as it often is, as concerned with the alternative 
1 Essay concerning Human Understanding, vol. 11. ch. xxi. p. 17. 



Determinism and Indeterminism 273 

issues, determinism or indeterminism; when the ques- 
tion, that is to say, is supposed to be, whether a volition 
has a cause or ground or has not. The determinist, 
confident that for every event there is a cause, 
assumes that he must therefore deny that the person 
in willing is free. The indeterminist, confident that 
this freedom is a fact, supposes that he must therefore 
deny that a volition has a cause. It is possible that 
each may be right in what he affirms, and wrong only 
in what he denies — possible that volitions have causes 
though these causes are free. That in some sense a 
volition is caused can only be disputed by one who is 
prepared to allow a positive reality to absolute chance, 
and to regard praise and blame as entirely meaningless 
and out of place ; to deny in fact at once, if he is an 
idealist, the existence alike of order and morality 
altogether. On the other hand, that in willing the 
agent is in some sense free can only be disputed by 
one who is prepared to maintain that a like necessi- 
tation applies both to the events of the so-called 
physical and to those of the moral world ; but that 
would be tantamount to denying any distinction between 
them. It seems plain then that there is some com- 
plexity in the subject-matter of this perennial con- 
troversy, which the bare antithesis — either determinism 
or indeterminism — does not resolve : in other words it 
seems still possible to maintain that a volition is in one 
sense determined and in another not determined. To 
ascertain and analyse this further complexity is what 
we must now attempt. 

We may begin with the concept of cause. Its 
source and primary meaning we find unquestionably in 

w. 18 



274 Freedom 

ourselves as active or efficient. Hence we derive the 
phrase 'efficient cause,' to which ' effect,' the name we 
give to the result of our activity, is strictly correlative ; 
so that, without an efficient, an effect is meaningless or 
impossible. To the question how an efficient or deter- 
mining cause produces its effect no answer has been, 
or seemingly can be, given that will enable us to 
resolve our sense of activity into simpler elements. 
The title bestowed by Aristotle on this form of 
causation, apx 7 ? T V^ Kivrjcreais, is perhaps instructive 
here : it is not itself a movement but what produces 
movement 1 . Again we find efficient causation used in 
two senses : we speak, that is to say, of a transeunt 
cause and also of an immanent cause. Thus we say a 
man eats his dinner and smokes his pipe ; and we say 
too he wakes, he breathes, he walks, and so forth. 
Metaphorically we also apply the concept of immanent 
causation to inanimate objects, as when we say that 
the sun shines or the tide rises. But inasmuch as 
whatever is inanimate is regarded also as inert and 
therefore incapable of changing of itself, the supposed 
immanent causality of mere things is resolved into 
transeunt causality. The sun's shining is resolved 
into molecular motion, the result of preceding mass 
motions ; and the tide is found to rise only because of 
the motions of the earth and the moon. 

Once more, even if we can give no answer to the 
question how we are active, we find that an answer to 

1 In the case of physical causation, on the other hand, the 
so-called cause is itself a motion, consequent on a precedent motion 
and so on in indefinite regress ; so that the notion of efficiency also 
recedes indefinitely. 



Meanings of Cause 275 

the question why in any special case we act at all, can 
usually be given. This reason for acting is what 
Aristotle called the final cause, and identified with the 
good as the end alike of all process and all motion. 
But science does not and, it may fairly be said, cannot 
take so wide a view. In dealing severally with the 
facts of the so-called material world, such ideas as final 
causes and the good are out of place : like vestal 
virgins, as Bacon said, they are here fruitless and so 
useless. Summing up then as regards the concept of 
cause, we may say that in the case of conative subjects 
it implies both immanent efficiency and purposiveness, 
but that in the case of inanimate things it implies 
neither. What it does imply in this case is still in 
large measure to seek. 

And so we come next to the idea of necessary con- 
nexion according to law, or the uniformity of nature, as 
it is otherwise called, for it is this, nowadays at any 
rate, that is meant first of all when the term causality 
is scientifically used. Thus Helmholtz, for example, 
says " the principle of causality is in fact nothing more 
than the presupposition that in all natural phenomena 
there is conformity to law (Gesetzlickkeit) 1 " But now 
in what sense can this regularity or uniformity of 
nature be called also a case of necessary connexion ? 
There is no logical necessity about a law of nature : it 
is neither in itself intuitively certain nor is it logically 
deducible from premisses that are themselves intuitively 
certain : to doubt or deny it entails no contradiction. 
Granted, it may perhaps be replied, the necessity is 
not formal or logical, it is real or natural necessity. 
1 Ueber die Erhaltung der Kraft, Ostwald's edn, p. 53. 

18—2 



276 Freedom 

But what does this mean ? When we speak of a fact 
or event as real what we primarily intend to assert is 
its presentation to sensory perception. Such assertorial 
or categorical judgments are for the percipient not 
less necessary and inevitable than so-called apodeictic 
judgments 1 . I am quite as little able to deny the fact 
of daylight, when at noon my eyes are open, as I am 
at any time to deny the truth that 2 + 2=4. 

The grounds of the necessitation in the two cases 
are different, no doubt ; but that for the present does 
not concern us, save as it may lead us to repeat that 
causal necessitation is not of the apodeictic sort. The 
same real necessitation, so to call it, which constrains 
me to affirm that it rains, when I am caught in a 
thunder-shower, constrains me also to affirm that the 
thunder-clap followed the lightning-flash ; for all this 
is perceived. What I am not constrained to affirm, 
for that is not perceived, is any real connexion between 
the two events. But though all that we perceive is 
the post hoc we no doubt frequently assert the propter 
hoc as well, and that too on the strength of a single 
instance. Such a venture is however purely anthropo- 
morphic : it rests entirely on the analogy that we observe 
between our own behaviour and what we regard as 
the behaviour of some inanimate thing. The primitive 
and popular concept of transeunt causation is altogether 
anthropomorphic in this wise ; as the whole structure 
of human speech amply shows. Thus the more 
completely thought is confined to the standpoint of 
immediate experience, the more causality implies the 
connexion of efficiens and effectwn, or real necessity ; 
1 Cf. on this point Sigwart's Logic, § 31. 



Causality as a postulate 277 

but then the less, in the same proportion, does it imply 
of uniformity or law. The transition from the one 
standpoint to the other falls almost entirely within the 
period of modern thought, and in our day may be said 
to be at length complete. But as I have discussed this 
at some length elsewhere it is needless to enlarge upon 
it here 1 . 

If then neither logical necessity nor necessity in 
the sense of effectuation is involved in the scientific 
concept of causality, what necessity is there left ? Only 
the hypothetical necessity of Helmholtz's 'presup- 
position.' The scientific principle of causality, in short, 
is a necessary postulate : scientific knowledge — in 
other words, knowledge expressed in general pro- 
positions concerning matters of fact — is possible only 
on the assumption that events actually happen with 
strict and uniform regularity. Now there is one theory 
of the world, and one only, which would justify this 
assumption completely, and that one is the mechanical 
theory. Accordingly the postulate of the uniformity 
of nature is frequently converted into the theorem that 
nature is a mechanical system ; and thus a methodo- 
logical principle becomes an ontological dogma. 

We can now see, as we suspected at starting, that 
to say an event is determined still leaves the nature of 
the determination an open question, and is so far 
ambiguous. When the wayfarer says, I am determined 
to go on against the wind, and the man of science says, 
It is determined that the dust will always go with it, 

1 Cf. Naturalism and Agnosticism, 3rd edn, vol. 1. pp. 62 ff., vol. 11. 
pp. 241 f. An excellent exposition of this transition is given by 
Dr Venn in his Empirical Logic, chs. ii. and iv. 



278 Freedom 

this ambiguity is at once apparent. In the first case 
determination implies efficient causation, self-direction 
and purpose : it does not imply any uniformity such 
that in all like circumstances a like determination always 
has recurred and always will. In the second case, on the 
other hand, this is precisely what is implied ; whereas 
here nothing is implied as to efficient causation ; also 
self-direction and purpose are either denied or treated as 
meaningless. But at this point the determinist may 
interpose, insisting that, to say nothing of habitual 
actions, there is abundant evidence of uniformity in 
human conduct even when most deliberate. There 
is unquestionably; but for all that the two forms of 
determination remain as different as ever': moreover 
the uniformities in the two cases are also altogether 
different. In every instance of deliberate conduct, 
though the agents decide alike, each is still conscious 
of self-determination, of purpose, and of effort in the 
pursuit of it, conscious of that ' action ' contrary to the 
line of least resistance, which in the case of inanimate 
things is impossible. And though in like situations 
there is often a corresponding likeness in the agents' 
conduct, often there is not ; there is here then no 
warrant for any such generalisation as natural law im- 
plies. If we ask a man why in a new and strange 
situation he acts as he does, it will hardly occur to him 
to explain his conduct by describing to us the im- 
mediately preceding situation. The answer he is likely 
to give, and that we naturally expect, will consist 
rather in describing the end at which he aims and the 
value that it has for him, as the reasons for his deter- 
mination. But if we ask the physicist to explain an 



Two forms of Determination 279 

unusual phenomenon he can do so only by discovering 
its antecedents, tracing these to their antecedents, and 
so on indefinitely : in other words he can explain it 
only on the assumption that it is determined by its 
place in a single rigorous mechanical system. 

Prima facie then the two forms of determina- 
tion are distinctly different: whether the difference 
is ultimate, and if it is not, which form is the more 
comprehensive — these are further questions. At all 
events the difference runs very deep. The one form, 
that of self-determination — implying such teleological 
categories as personality, utility and worth — dominates 
all our interpretations of the world as a realm of ends. 
The other form, that of determination according to 
fixed law, implying in the last resort only the categories 
of mechanism, underlies our scientific description of the 
so-called realm of nature or world of things. The one 
has been called the ethical postulate of freedom, the 
other the epistemological postulate of necessity 1 . 

But in truth self-determination extends beyond the 
self-conscious and rational autonomy that we find only 
in the ethical sphere, and is besides not simply an 
ideal or moral postulate. The contrast with which we 
have to deal then is the wider one between spontaneity 
or individual activity as prima facie a fact on the 
one side and the scientific concept of inert matter as 
a constant quantity on the other 2 . Individuality is 

1 So far the old distinction of Libertarianism and Necessitarianism 
is really clearer and therefore, pace J. S. Mill, also ' fairer ' than that 
now in vogue of Indeterminism and Determinism. 

2 As already remarked (Lect. i. p. 9) the negative concept of inertia 
or inactivity presupposes the positive fact of activity. 



280 Freedom 

inseparable from mind and altogether foreign to matter, 
which loses nothing by disintegration and gains nothing 
by integration ; whereas to divide one mind into many 
or to aggregate many minds into one is meaningless 
and impossible. But for all that, the more individual 
minds cooperate the higher they rise and the more 
they achieve severally and collectively. Hence the 
steady advance in the efficiency of the world of ends, 
which Wundt has called the dominant law of spiritual 
life and entitled ' the increase of spiritual energy ' in 
contrast to the energy of the physical world that is 
held neither to increase nor to decrease 1 . 

Wherein then does the difference between them lie? 
Perhaps if we say that it lies in the different meaning 
given to direction in the two cases, the contrast we are 
considering will be made clearer on another side. 
When we regard the world as a realm of ends, direction 
implies guidance and control, and therewith activity ; 
but when we regard it as a physical whole, direction 
has simply its literal, spatial meaning. We describe 
the inertia of a moving body by saying that it cannot 
of itself change its direction or its velocity. And 
whenever by the so-called ' action ' of another body 
either of these components of its motion is altered 
there will also, according to the mechanical theory, be 
a compensatory alteration in the components of the 
motion of that other body. Then generalising, and 
agreeably to the notion of inertia, we have the principle 
known as the Conservation of Momentum, a principle 
which perhaps expresses as clearly as any that the 

1 Wundt, 'Wachsthum der geistigen Energie,' Sysfem der Philo- 
sophic, 1889, p. 315. 



Two senses of Direction 28 1 

so-called uniformity of nature completely excludes all 
ideas of spontaneity and guidance. 

Yet that such guidance prima facie exists is no 
longer seriously disputed : every movement of every 
living thing is an instance of it. Nevertheless the 
fact of guidance is, by the very terms of the mechanical 
theory itself, a fact outside the range of that theory. 
Moreover, primarily for the sake of such guiding con- 
trol, and largely by means of it, the theory itself has 
been elaborated. And those who know it best only 
claim that it tells us what will happen so far as things 
are left to themselves, but not that it can show how 
guidance is possible nor when it will occur \ As often 
as it does occur then, we have an event which does 
not lie within the sweep of the so-called uniformity of 
nature regarded as a system determined throughout 
by mechanical necessity, determined in such wise that 
all its uncontrolled working admits of rigorous calcu- 
lation. Every such event, so far as the system is 
concerned, is a new beginning to which, as inert, the 
system simply submits, and yet for which it, as inert, 
cannot possibly account. It is just the continual 
accumulation of such unique events and conservation 
of their values that distinguishes the historical evolution 
of experience from the steady downward trend of the 
physical world conceived as independent of experience. 
The course of the one, its final equilibration, is theo- 
retically calculable from the beginning ; the course of 
the other, the final harmony of the realm of ends, is 
not. 

1 Cf. an excellent article by Professor J. H. Poynting on 
'Physical Law and Life,' Hibbert Journal, 1903, pp. 728 ff. 



282 Freedom 

Much as Plato found the characteristics of justice 
more conspicuous in the state than in the individual, so 
perhaps we find that in the broad contrast between 
nature and history the difference we have been seeking 
to analyse and elucidate is more apparent than it is 
when we confine our attention to the individual alone. 
But for all that, the solution of our problem — and that 
of Plato's too — ultimately turns on the reality of 
individual existence. Efficiency and spontaneity, pur- 
pose and worth, these ontological and teleological 
categories are more and more ruthlessly extruded from 
the description of nature as a phenomenal whole the 
more that description succeeds in attaining to scien- 
tific precision. Yet these are the categories that in 
the main define what we mean by an individual or 
a person. The course of history we refer to self- 
determinations, the course of nature science regards 
as due to mechanical necessitations. 

But are these alternatives, determination by per- 
sonal agency and determination according to universal 
law, really mutually exclusive ? We picture the course 
of history as continually foreclosing genuine alter- 
natives, and the course of nature as throughout 
completely determined : the future in the one case 
cannot, we think, in the other certainly can — 
theoretically at least — be deduced from the present. 
But there are many who think otherwise and who 
include the doings of men as well as the motions of 
matter under the phrase * uniformity of nature.' These 
we may term thorough-going determinists ; for there 
is no ambiguity in the meaning they assign to deter- 
mination. It is simply the (hypothetical) necessity of 



Analysis of Voluntary Action 283 

science. Still whether such a position is compatible 
with the existence of a plurality of really conative 
agents remains to be seen. We must first examine 
the position itself. 

Hitherto we have not attempted to analyse the 
process of voluntary action itself, but as the contention 
of the thorough-going determinists turns upon this 
analysis we must now follow them. Their procedure 
in the main is to regard motives as forces, between 
which — in deliberation — there may be a varying con- 
flict till at length one proves itself the strongest, 
whereupon the action, that it is said to determine, 
ensues. The man meanwhile seems to play the part 
of a simply passive spectator. How little he deter- 
mines the result according to this view is shown, for 
example, by the reiterated statements of that classic 
determinist, Hobbes : "In deliberation there be many 
wills, whereof not any is the cause of a voluntary action 
but the last," "Will therefore is the last appetite in 
deliberating." Now there is no doubt that motives in 
relation to each other have a certain analogy to forces 
or to weights in a scale, whence indeed the word de- 
liberation is derived. But the relation of motives to 
the subject deliberating is not at all that of independent 
forces applied to an inert object, albeit Hobbes treats 
of them under the head of Physics 1 . Appetite and 
aversion, that is to say conation, implies something 
that seeks and shuns, a subject that actively strives 
according as it feels and as long as it lives. Psy- 
chologists do not ordinarily talk of motives save in 
connexion with deliberation, which in strictness is an 
1 English Works, Molesworth's edn, vol. i. p 408. 



284 Freedom 

intellectual rather than a conative process ; but for the 
purpose of our present discussion it will be convenient, 
and need not mislead, if we regard motives not as pleas 
or reasons for acting but as impulses or tendencies to 
action. So regarded their characteristic is not, that 
like external forces they move or tend to move the 
subject, but that they are themselves the subject 
moving or tending to move, or more accurately, acting 
or tending to act. 

We say indeed that hunger makes a man eat, but 
we do not interpret this statement as we should the 
statement that heat makes a glass crack. In both cases 
we have a certain situation, but in the one case the 
active subject changes the situation ; in the other the 
situation changes the passive object. Again in what 
we may call physical situations, where several forces 
concur, the change is always their resultant and each, 
strong and weak alike, produces its full effect. In 
psychical situations, on the other hand, where several 
motives are said to conflict, the eventual action is 
jdetermined in accordance with one only, the so-called 
strongest motive : the rejected motives, if they tell at 
all, do so simply as testing steadfastness of purpose. It 
is perhaps hardly needful to say that strength does not 
here, as in the case of a force, imply any reference to 
an external standard. In a certain situation, which 
they share in common, so far as two persons can ever 
be situated alike, one will say : This motive weighs 
most with me, and the other, This the most with me. 

The analogy then between the relation of forces 
applied to an inert object and the relation of conations 
to an active subject seems to fail in all essential points. 



Motives and Forces 285 

So long as the subject does not act but merely 'de- 
liberates or ponders ' how he shall act, there is some 
resemblance in his procedure to that of using a balance 
to determine weights, and the suggested metaphor is 
as old as Plato ; but it is only a metaphor after all. 
When, however, we consider the facts in their active 
rather than their cognitive aspect the disparity between 
the psychical and the physical seems complete. Forces, 
though distinct, combine their effects only because they 
converge on one body : motives, though distinct, con- 
flict only because they diverge, so to say, from one 
subject. The forces, that is, are applied to the body, 
the motives spring from the subject. The body moves 
in the one path which the forces collectively determine, 
the subject moves in the one path which it selectively 
determines. The magnitude of a force is referred to an 
objective standard, the strength of a motive depends 
on its subjective worth : the sufficient reason is in the 
one case mechanical, in the other it is teleological. 

Nevertheless, the thorough-going determinist will 
doubtless rejoin, these differences are comparatively 
superficial, and when we think the matter out what 
we come down to at last is in both cases alike the 
same necessitation ; the same complete determination 
of the consequent by its antecedents. We speak of a 
man's path through life as well as of a body's path 
through space, and this, however intricate it may have 
been, we know was throughout perfectly definite and 
at every point inevitably determined. Now what is 
true of the motions of a body is true of the doings of 
a man. Well, it is certainly true always that whatever 
is once determined is inevitably determined and that 



286 Freedom 

in this sense the complete antecedents uniquely deter- 
mine the consequent. But is this a reason for ignoring 
the difference between the circumstances that determine 
the rolling of a stone and the volitions that determine 
the movements of a hero ? Or can anyone seriously 
maintain that we get to the bottom of things by thus 
ignoring it? If the said difference is merely an ac- 
cidental accessory, what is the essential characteristic 
that pertains alike to the physical event and to the 
voluntary act ? It is, the determinist will repeat, that 
the antecedents in both cases, in the rolling of the 
stone and in the willing of the man, are beyond 
control: as Hobbes has said, "The will is also caused 
by other things whereof it disposeth not 1 ." If we ask 
for further explication, as we well may, we get two 
answers, more or less connected, which it will be best 
to consider in turn. 

First, it is said, a mans volitions depend on his 
nature, and that is not a matter of his choice. If it be 
urged that often they depend rather on the character 
which he has acquired, a character which may control 
his nature ; it is replied that acquired character is due 
to modification of nature induced by circumstances, 
so that after all we come back to nature or original 
character in the end. But what real distinction, we 
may ask, can anyone find between a subject and its 
nature or character 2 ? As to what an individual subject 

1 'Liberty and Necessity,' English Works, Molesworth's edn, 
vol. iv. p. 274. 

2 It is not of course with such specific attributes as it shares with 
others of its kind but with its own peculiar traits that we are here 
concerned. 



A Mans Volitions and his Nature 287 

is, there may be room for much metaphysical dispute. 
But at least we are certain that it is not an indefinite 
'this,' or an abstract entity, having only an extrinsic 
connexion with its so-called nature. Thinking is re- 
lating, and we are sometimes led in consequence to 
talk as if reality were altogether resolvable into 
relations. It is this same habit of thought that leads 
the indeterminist to talk of the freedom of the will 
apart from motives, and that leads the determinist, 
as Priestley does, to talk of " motives as the proper 
causes of human actions, though it is the man that is 
called the agent 1 ." The efficiency and initiative that 

1 "No writer," says Schopenhauer, "has set forth the necessity 
of voluntary acts so thoroughly and convincingly as Priestley in his... 
Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity" I trust I shall be excused then, 
if I venture to give a specimen of his reasoning. It occurs in one of 
the most important sections of his work, in which he is arguing 
against his Libertarian friend, Price. "Suppose," he says, "a 
philosopher to be entirely ignorant of the constitution of the human 
mind, but to see, as Dr Price acknowledges, that men do, in fact, 
act according to their affections and desires, i.e. in one word, according 
to motives, would he not as in a case of the doctrine of chances, 
immediately infer that there must be a fixed cause for this coincidence 
of motives and actions ? Would he not say that, though he could 
not see into the man, the connexion was natural, and necessary, 
because constant? And since the motives, in all cases, precede the 
actions, would he not naturally, i.e. according to the custom of 
philosophers in similar cases, say that the motive was the cause of the 
action? And would he not be led by the obvious analogy to 
compare the mind to a balance, which was inclined this way or that, 
according to the motives presented to it?... Therefore," he presently 
concludes, "in proper philosophical language, the motive ought to 
be called the proper cause of the action. It is as much so as anything 
in nature is the cause of anything else " — sentences which Schopen- 
hauer thought it worth while to quote. (J. Priestley, Disquisitions 



288 Freedom 

the indeterminist seems to find in the man apart from 
his character the determinist professes to find in the 
character apart from the man. But whereas it is 
certain that there cannot be less in the concrete self 
than we know, there may very well be a great deal 
more ; and therefore, while it may be possible to clear 
indeterminism of its seeming paradox, it is not possible 
to reconcile thorough-going determinism with our actual 
experience. 

We certainly have no experience of events without 
causes, but we experience determination in both the 
forms which make up the two sides of causation : the 
effect as determined, the cause as determining ; and we 
experience both, not objectively as presentations of what 
is not self, but subjectively as immediate states of self. 
We have moreover no ground for regarding the one 
as a whit more real than the other : if pleasure and 
pain are verily subjective feeling or affection, conation 
is verily subjective activity or effectuation. What we 
are here calling a motive implies both ; and essentially 
distinct though they are, both arise together in certain 
situations. But not even the feeling, still less the 
conation, can be described as caused by the situation, 
if that is regarded simply as any science except psy- 
chology would regard it. Psychologically the situation 
must be interesting ; but this is not a quality pertaining 
to the situation as such, it is a character that the sub- 
ject as such gives to it. And gives why ? Because 
the subject is not, like an inanimate thing, indifferent 

relating to Matter and Spirit, 1782, vol. 11. pp. 64 ff.) I fancy, 
if I had myself put this forward as a presentation of the determinist's 
case, it would have been condemned at once as an unfair travesty. 



Determinism and Sensationalism 289 

to circumstances, but has ends and aims to realise, and 
therefore assumes a different attitude towards its en- 
vironment according as this helps or hinders it in the 
pursuit of its purposes — purposes which conform to no 
general law save that of self-conservation and better- 
ment. Its own character determines the character that 
it gives to objects, and its behaviour towards them is 
so far essentially self-determination. To deny all this 
is tacitly to deny the reality of the self or subject of 
experience altogether. 

This brings us to the second answer, a psycho- 
logical analysis of experience in much favour with 
thorough -going determinists, wherein this denial is 
openly made. Hume, it will be remembered, de- 
scribed the mind as "nothing but a bundle or collection 
of different perceptions, which... are in a perpetual 
movement or flux." In this bundle his successors 
signalised appetites and aversions, which are also in 
perpetual flux. They agree then with him in main- 
taining that " it cannot therefore be from any of these 
impressions," as he says, " or from any other, that the 
idea of self is derived, and consequently there is no 
such idea 1 " — so that, speaking plainly, there is no such 
reality. If there were, said Bain, "a fourth or residual 
department [of psychology] would need to be consti- 
tuted, the department of 'self or Me-ation, and we 
should set about the investigation of the laws (or the 
anarchy) prevailing there, as in the three remaining 
branches [Emotion, Volition, Intellection]." " I can- 
not," he continues, " light upon anything of the sort; 

1 Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, Green and Grose's edition, 
vol. 1. pp. 533 f. 

vv. 19 



290 Freedom 

and in the setting-up of a determining power under the 
name of 'self/ as a contrast to the whole region of 
motives... I see only an erroneous conception of the 
facts 1 ." 

The hopeless shortcomings of this doctrine — 
variously known as Sensationalism, Associationism, 
Presentationism — have been often exposed, and it is 
doubtful if in the present day there is a single psy- 
chologist who would defend it. We might then fairly 
content ourselves by saying that thorough-going de- 
terminism finds at once in this sensationalism its logical 
outcome and its refutation. But the reasons of its 
failure can be put very briefly. In the first place, 
determinism and sensationalism alike, in common with 
all naturalistic thinking, set out from the objective 
standpoint, as if it were absolute. The subjective 
factor in all experience, which the natural sciences 
can safely ignore, can, they assume, be ignored by 
the moral and historical sciences too. The category 
of ' attribute or property ' which implies possession is 
metaphorically used of things, though these, albeit 
qualified, in reality possess nothing. "Without pro- 
perty no person," Hegel has said: but we may convert 
this and say, Without a person no property. Ex- 
perience is in this sense property : it is always 
owned. Percepts and appetites that nobody has are 
not percepts and appetites at all. To talk of motives 
conflicting of themselves is as absurd as to talk of 
commodities competing in the absence of traders. 

1 The Emotio?is and the Will, 3rd edn, 1875, p. 492. To 'contrast' 
self and motives in this fashion is indeed just that ' erroneous 
conception of the facts' referred to above, p. 286 Jin. 



The Result 291 

Again, if there is only a bundle of percepts and 
motives, but no self to determine or control, it is 
obvious that there can be no self to be determined 
or controlled. But since presentationism cannot con- 
sistently regard presentations themselves as purposive, 
there can be no purpose in the Many at all. Finally, 
since the only causality naturalism recognises is the 
hypothetical regularity of sequence, there is no place 
left for efficiency either : the world is resolved into 
mechanism, and so experience is explained away. 
Such a redudio ad absurdum is surely an indirect 
proof of the reality of that self-determination which 
we directly experience. 



19- 



LECTURE XIV. 

FREEDOM AND FOREKNOWLEDGE. 

We may perhaps claim to have found that the 
thorough-going determinism, which denies self-deter- 
mination and self-direction in toto, refutes itself by 
overshooting the mark and proving too much : by 
resolving the subject of experience into an abstraction 
it denies the reality of experience altogether. But 
there are those who profess to admit freedom in the 
sense of self-determination, in common with the Liber- 
tarian, and who yet maintain necessity in the sense of 
natural law, in common with the Necessitarian. I am 
thinking, of course, of Kant and his solution of this 
antinomy between the demands of pure science and 
pure ethics as he conceived them — a solution which 
Schopenhauer praises as among the most admirable 
and profound achievements of human genius. The self 
is here noumenal and its freedom transcendental, but 
its active manifestations are phenomenal and necessarily 
determined, Though many besides Schopenhauer 
have been impressed with the amazing ingenuity of this 
Kantian doctrine, he, almost alone, seems to have had 
the courage or the hardihood to accept it completely 1 . 
At this time of day then it would be unprofitable to 
begin by discussing it at length, though it may repay 

1 Fichte and Schelling ought perhaps to be included. 



The Doctrine of Kant and Schopenhauer 293 

us presently to consider whether after all beneath this 
splendid failure there does not lie a great truth. But 
it is Schopenhauer's exposition that more immediately 
concerns us. Adopting the scholastic principle, Operari 
sequitur esse, he says : — " It has been a fundamental 
error, a vcrrepov nporepov of all times, to assign the 
necessity to the esse and the freedom to the operari. 
On the contrary freedom pertains to the esse alone; 
but from this and the motives the operari follows of 
necessity; and from what we do we know what we 
are 1 ." And " necessary" he defines as "that which 
follows from a given sufficient ground 2 ." 

So far and at first sight there seems nothing here 
incompatible with self-determination as the Libertarian 
understands it : a being that in a given situation is 
itself the sufficient ground of what it does is all that 
we mean by a spontaneous or free being. The only 
such beings that we know or can conceive are conscious, 
that is to say conative and cognitive, subjects. But 
we find no such restriction of freedom in Schopenhauer's 
doctrine. The freedom that he allows is not confined 
to conscious beings ; and on looking closer we shall see 
that consciousness has essentially nothing to do with 
it. It is the inner essence of each thing, he maintains, 
whether it be physical force or vital force or will, that 
determines its characteristic reaction. The law operari 
sequitur esse applies alike to all : as its reactions 
disclose the nature of a chemical substance, so his 
motives disclose the character of a man. " Objectively 

1 Sdmmtliche Werke, 'Freiheit des Willens,' Frauenstadt's edn, 
vol. iv. p. 97. 

2 Op. cit. p. 7. 



294 Freedom and Foreknowledge 

considered, a man's behaviour," he tells us, "like the 
action of every natural essence, is recognised as falling 
necessarily under the causal law in its utmost rigour : 
subjectively on the other hand everyone feels that he 
always does only what he wills. This however only 
amounts to saying that his action is the pure outcome 
of his own peculiar nature : even the meanest thing 
therefore would feel the same, if it could feel at all 1 ." 
What all this comes to then is substantially and briefly 
as follows : — The esse of everything is noumenal and 
is will or energy of a definite kind, the kind differing 
for all the so-called physical forces, for all organic 
species and for all individual men. The operari of 
everything is phenomenal, and involves two factors ; 
(i) the original esse, i.e. force or will, and (2), in 
addition to this, the determining condition or occasion, 
answering to what in physics we term causes in the 
narrower sense, to what in biology we call stimuli, in 
psychology motives. All that these so-called causes 
account for is the when and where of the manifestations 
{Aeusserungen) of the primitive things per se, which — 
themselves beyond explanation and causation — are the 
principles of all explanation and the source of all 
causation. As such a thing per se or noumenon, man 
according to Kant and Schopenhauer alike is free — 
free as a cause that is not in turn an effect. 

And now what is the result of all this freedom of 
the noumenal world ? A phenomenal world of cast-iron 
necessity ; and since this is the only world we know 
about, the determinist, so far as objective experience 
extends, is completely in the right. But how from such 
1 Op. tit. pp. 57, 98. 



The Phenomenal and the Noumenal 295 

complete liberty does this rigorous necessity come about? 
Because the essential nature or character of everything 
is unalterable : what is conscious and what is not are 
in this respect, according to Schopenhauer at any rate, 
completely on a par. In like manner Kant affirms that 
"all the acts of a man, so far as they are phenomena, 
are determined according... to the order of nature, and 
if we could investigate [them]... to the very bottom, 
there would not be a single human action which we 
could not predict with certainty and recognise from its 
preceding conditions as necessary, just as we do an 
eclipse of the sun or the moon 1 ." 

It is not this assignment to freedom of a purely 
extra-phenomenal character that is at variance with 
the pluralistic interpretation of evolution, although it is 
against this that most of the objections to the Kantian 
doctrine have been directed. On the contrary, as I 
shall attempt presently to show, in this respect it 
contains, as I have already hinted, a great truth. But 
if the characters of men, say, are fixed and immutable, 
just as the qualities of the chemical elements are assumed 
to be ; and the course of history therefore is as amenable 
to calculation as the movements of the planets, then — so 
far as experience goes — we may as well accept at once 
'the firmly rooted conviction of the ancients concerning 
Fate,' as Schopenhauer was prepared to do 2 . 

We must inquire, therefore, in the first place 
whether the statement so often made by determinists 
is really defensible, viz. that persons and things are so 

1 Critique of Pure Reason, ist edn, p. 550, M. M.'s trans, p. 474; 
Practical Reason, Hartenstein's edn, vol. v. p. 104. 

2 Op. cit. p. 60. 



296 Freedom and Foreknowledge 

far on a par that from a complete knowledge of a man's 
present 'empirical character' all his future actions could 
be foretold. It is obvious however that more than 
this would be needed ; that in fact a complete specifi- 
cation of all the circumstances in which the man is 
hereafter to be placed would be equally indispensable. 
It is obvious again that nothing short of a complete 
knowledge of the characters of all his contemporaries as 
well would suffice to render such complete specification 
possible. But, once more, the thoughts and deeds of 
contemporaries on the one hand and physical events on 
the other obviously could not be regarded as two inde- 
pendent series ; for conduct is unquestionably affected 
by natural changes, while at the same time certain 
natural changes are the result of human interference. 

What we should have to deal with then would 
be one vast predetermined series. The idea of such 
a rigorously concatenated system is just what the 
thorough-going determinist understands by the Uni- 
formity of Nature. All the same, when the man of 
science proceeds to picture out this uniformity, he does 
so only on the supposition that the whole is a mechanism, 
whose ultimate constituents are qualitatively alike and 
differ only quantitatively, in respect of mass, configura- 
tion, acceleration, and so forth. Given a complete 
knowledge of the whole of such a system at two instants 
and its state at any assigned date in the future or in 
the past is ideally calculable. Men also interact and 
affect each other, in so far as they are members of a 
social system ; but then their characters and interests 
are not alike, and therefore for each the world, though 
objectively the same, is different too. The words of 



Mechanism and Morals 297 

Terence, Quot homines tot sententiae, are here to the 
point. As Oliver Wendell Holmes has somewhere 
humorously put it, whenever two persons M and N 
converse together there are six individuals concerned, 
M as he is, M as he thinks himself to be, M as N 
thinks him to be ; and a like trinity as respects N. 
While it is true that we find no two individuals of 
our acquaintance entirely alike, it is true also on the 
other hand that we know no one completely: indeed 
adequate knowledge about the individual is allowed 
to be logically impossible. So far Professor Royce is 
right in his emphatic contention that an individual — 
however intimately known — is, as known, but an 
instance of a type : that M or N is the only instance 
we know does not make him essentially unique 1 . If 
on the strength of this partial knowledge we venture 
to predict his future conduct, we are generalising, 
following, that is to say, the hypothetical procedure of 
science, as truly as when we affirm that he will die. 

But in certain circumstances the one prediction 
would be as justifiable as the other, since both alike 
would be instances of the ' uniformity of nature,' viz. 
when the man's action, like a forced move in chess, is 
externally constrained ; or when again, like some trick 
of manner, it is secondarily automatic, a case of 
mechanical routine, the outcome of the dead self, the 
woodenness of the man as distinct from the growing 
life. The cases to which Schopenhauer so triumph- 
antly appeals are in part of this sort. And even in the 
rest we find our confident expectations often belied: the 
most humdrum mortals rising to great occasions, and 
1 The World and the Individual, vol. I. pp. 292-4. 



298 Freedom and Foreknowledge 

others, in whom the hue of resolution seemed native 
and ingrained, growing pallid in the supreme crisis 
and finally renouncing their cause. But the literature 
of conversions and counter-conversions, of which Pro- 
fessor James in his Gifford Lectures has given such an 
admirable selection, is amply sufficient to turn the flank 
of Schopenhauer's position. Moreover not only Kant 
but even Schopenhauer, the more rigorous determinist 
of the two, is inconsistent enough to recognise these 
radical changes of character. To be sure they regard 
them as ' mysteries,' cases of regeneration or new birth, 
manifestations not of ' nature ' but of ' grace ' ; but it is 
enough for us now that they admit their possibility. 
If the appeal then is to be to facts, can anyone soberly 
maintain that it is even ideally possible to forecast 
what he, still less what another, will think and do a 
week hence ? Besides, even if the forecast could be 
made it would take the week to make it ; for none of 
the intervening thoughts and deeds could be safely 
omitted ; nor could their rate be accelerated unless a 
like acceleration held throughout the world — and then 
we should be relatively just where we were before. 
The so-called forecast in a word would be after the 
event 1 . Surely if there is an empirical common-place 
beyond dispute it is this, that no man knows before- 
hand even his own possibilities completely, to say 
nothing of those of another. 

So far as experience goes what we find is not 
simply uniformity and routine, natura naturata, but 
also innovation and variation, natura naturans. Hence 
while it is possible to publish Bradshaw s Gtiide as 

1 Cf. Bergson, Les Donnees immediates, 2 me edn, pp. 140 ff. 






Freedom as Determinism 299 

well as the Nautical Almanack, ZadkieVs Almanack is 
a fraud, and other forms of clairvoyance an absurdity, in 
spite of Schopenhauer's confident appeal to them. But 
after all his thorough-going determinism — or 'noumenal 
freedom' — was not based on experience. Further his 
definition of necessary as "that which follows from a 
given sufficient ground" does not justify him in assuming 
that the ground is once for all fixed and unalterable 1 . 
That is an assumption which he simply took over 
straight from Plato's theory of ideas and grievously 
misapplied. If on this assumption there could be 
events, their rigorous concatenation would, of course, 
be inevitable. But though the fixed and unalterable 
character of the 'free,' noumenal, grounds of nature 
would necessitate a phenomenal world fast bound in fate, 
we cannot till we have found this infer that. To assert 
such a character of the noumenal, and thence to deduce 
what the phenomenal, world must be, is mere dogmatism. 
Nevertheless it was to this solid mechanism or 
* nature-necessity ' as he called it that Kant appealed in 
support of his 'empirical ' determinism. And most incon- 
sistently, for he has himself allowed that this miscalled 
'necessity of nature' neither logically nor really deserves 
the name. The 'uniformity of nature' is indeed so far a 
priori, as being part and parcel of the postulate that the 
very possibility of any empirical forecast at all implies. 
But nowpostulation isa practical not a theoretical matter: 

1 What, we wonder, would Schopenhauer have said of the Kea, 
the New Zealand parrot that has developed the extraordinary habit 
of picking holes in the back of the living sheep ; or of other instances 
of changed habits which Darwin gives? {Origin of Species, 6th edn, 
pp. 141-3)- 



300 Freedom and Foreknowledge 

what then in the last resort does it really mean? Experi- 
ence itself being practical, and theory the result not the 
presupposition of experience, we can put the matter most 
simply by saying of experience what Helmholtz has 
said: — Hiergilt nurdereineRath: Vertraueund handle! 

Das Unzulangliche 
Dann wirtfs Ereigniss 1 . 

This then is our postulate reduced to its lowest 
terms, and with this the progress of experience entirely 
agrees. The Many have all alike had to trust and 
try, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, but on 
the whole always learning and so gradually achieving 
the order that determinism assumes to exist a priori. 
This established order or natura naturata then implies 
free causes, as Kant and Schopenhauer maintained, 
for it is their work ; but why suppose that by their 
very first stroke they forge for themselves adamantine 
chains ? Yet this is what Schopenhauer certainly 
assumed 2 and what Kant seems to assume. Such a 
supposition, so far from making experience possible, 
would rather make it impossible ; for if the nature or 
essence of all agents were irrevocably fixed, how could 
— nay why should — there be any evolution at all ? 
A Spinozistic world, existing sub specie aeternitatis but 
really devoid of change, is all we could expect. 

Nevertheless, as I shall now try to show, the 
Kantian distinction between intelligible and empirical 
character is of real importance ; although, of course, 
we must take it to mean not that a subject has two 
characters, one noumenal the other phenomenal, but 

1 Handbuch der physiologischen Optik^ 2 te Aus. p. 594. 

2 Cf. Sammtliche Werke, Frauenstadt's edn, vol. 11. p. 598, vol. iv. p. 97. 



Homo noumenon and Homo phenomenon 301 

simply that in the latter we have sundry manifestations 
of what the subject's character really is : operari 
sequitur esse, as Schopenhauer said. But Kant, I 
think, never meant to regard the free subject as 
Schopenhauer did, that is, as related to its acts as a 
logical essence is to its predicates. When therefore 
he speaks of it as out of time he does not mean to 
exclude process and change in the sense in which logic 
excludes these : that he postulates immortality in order 
to the attainment of perfection is enough to show this. 
What then does he mean ? What he really means is, 
I think, far more clearly expressed in his distinction of 
homo noumenon and homo phenomenon. As phenomenal, 
'when we are merely observing* 1 a man, he is an object 
simply, not a subject. Like all observed objects, he 
is so far conceived as merely part and parcel of that 
continuous whole we call nature ; and the successive 
states through which he is observed to pass are con- 
ceived as regularly linked in with those of other 
phenomena in this one unbroken continuum. It is to 
this regular succession of phenomenal events that the 
category of causality as used in science applies. 

But besides this causal relation to other phenomena 
everything phenomenal is related, on the one hand to 
the subject to whom it appears, and on the other to 
the 'transcendental object,' of which it is the appear- 
ance. Whether consistently or not with the main 
position of his critical philosophy, it is at all events a 
fact that Kant never dreamt of questioning the exist- 
ence of things per se as the ground of the phenomena 
that we observe externally. It is equally certain that 
1 Kant's phrase. Cf. the context of first passage quoted above, p. 295. 



302 Freedom and Foreknowledge 

he regarded the 'transcendental subject' or the ground 
of the facts that we experience internally as also 
such a thing per se ; and that not simply from the 
standpoint of practice but also from that of theory. In 
a word the experience of phenomena, whether external 
or internal, implies the existence of corresponding 
things per se as their grounds or causes ; as Leibniz, 
Herbart and Lotze maintained. Wie viel Schein so 
vie I Hindeutung aufs Sein was as true for Kant as it 
was for them. But the causality in this case is not the 
phenomenal and relative causality of science, but the 
noumenal and absolute causality that pertains solely to 
the ultimate efficiency of the thing per se. To man 
conceived as noumenal this absolute or free causality 
belongs. The reasonable in thought and conduct 
affords the most adequate instances of such causality ; 
for " reason," as Kant says, " does not yield to the 
impulse that is given empirically and does not follow 
the order of things as they present themselves as 
phenomena, but frames for itself, with perfect spon- 
taneity, a new order according to ideas to which it 
adapts the empirical conditions 1 ." But he also gives 
the following simpler example : — " If at this moment I 
rise from my chair with perfect freedom, without the 
necessarily determining influence of natural causes, a 
new series has its absolute beginning in this event, 
with all its natural consequences ad indejinitum*" 
j The phenomenal world then we may compare, as 
Lotze has done, to a continuous texture or fabric con- 
sisting entirely of the joint effects produced, the overt 

1 Critique, ist edn, p. 548, M.M.'s trans, p. 473. 

2 Op. cit. p. 450, M.M. p. 392. 



The Phenomenal as filled Time 303 

deeds done, by innumerable things per se or agents. 
The pattern of this texture is what we call filled time, 
and the process of filling-in is, as we know, ever going 
forward. So far as we are merely cognitive, we are 
confined to observations, past and present, of this pro- 
cess and to such more or less probable inferences 
concerning the future as these suggest. As a matter 
of fact our inductions frequently turn out right, and 
they prove to be more reliable the more methodically 
we proceed. It is so ; but as already said there is no 
necessity, either logical or real, about it. " For we 
could quite well imagine," Kant himself allows, " that 
phenomena might possibly be such that the under- 
standing would not find them conformable... : all might 
be in such confusion that nothing would be found in the 
succession of phenomena which could supply a rule of 
synthesis corresponding to the category of cause and 
effect, so that this category would therefore be altogether 
null and void and meaningless 1 ." Thus it is simply to 
the ideal of a ' rule' of succession, which the weaving of 
the phenomenal texture de facto suggests, that we apply 
the concept called by Kant ' causality of nature.' 

Entirely distinct from this phenomenal or empirical 
causality is that which Kant calls 'causality of freedom ' 
— intelligible or noumenal causality. So different are 
the two that positive science fights shy of the terms, 
■ cause and effect,' because of their association with 
this efficient or noumenal causality, the existence 
of which positive science ignores and naturalism 
dogmatically denies altogether 2 . But to the grounds 

1 Critique of the Pure Reason. Analytic § 13, M.M. p. 80. 

2 Cf. Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. 11. pp. 241, 247. 



304 Freedom and Foreknowledge 

for assuming its existence we need not now return. 
At all events, as the very causality that produces the 
pattern in 'the context of nature' — Kant's phrase by 
the way — this noumenal causality obviously cannot be 
identified with the phenomenal causality — so-called — 
that the pattern itself displays. The essential charac- 
teristic of the latter is objective time-order according 
to universal law : the essential characteristic of the 
former is subjective initiation. Since it freely inserts 
those ' links in the chain of nature ' it cannot, I say, be 
a part of the time-order that it makes. As compared 
with the phenomenal solidarity or continuity that they 
jointly produce, these independent, real, causes may then 
be said to be out of time. Their acts are not 'events' 
that seem to come out of (evenire), or to follow from, 
what has preceded in the time-process: they are rather 
' interventions ' that appear in this process and con- 
stitute its further evolution. Accordingly in reference 
to them and them only ' ought ' has a meaning ; for, 
as Kant truly says : " If we look merely at the course 

f nature, 'ought' has no meaning whatever It 

expresses a possible action, the ground of which cannot 
be anything but a mere concept," cannot be a phe- 
nomenon 1 . This concept, as we should say now, is 
the teleological concept of worth or of the good, 
whereby the realm of ends in which it obtains is still 
further differentiated from the realm of nature in which 
it is meaningless. In the one, events appear as deter- 
mined by preceding events ; in the other, actions are 
initiated to secure future ends. 

But can we then say that the realm of ends is out 
1 Op. at. p. 547, M.M. p. 472. 



° 






Abstract Time 305 

of time ? Certainly not, as I have already maintained, 
in the sense that it is, like Plato's world of ideas, an 
eternal world of immutable essences, a logical world 
but not a real world at all. In tending to equate 
' intelligible character ' to mere essentia -f existentia, as 
Schopenhauer expressly did, Kant's procedure is in- 
defensible as well as inconsistent. But what is the 
time, beyond which, so to say, free agents are said to 
exist ? It is that time which Kant conceived as 
yielding an exact science of chronometry, the pendant 
of geometry the exact science of space. It is time as 
a continuous quantity of one dimension, and so far 
comparable to a line, save that its points or parts are 
not simultaneous but successive. Succession in this 
time is conceived as constant; in other words this 
time is regarded as homogeneous and so as measurable, 
divisible into intervals of equal length. In a word it 
is the abstract time of science in which we imagine the 
successive states of the whole phenomenal world to be 
plotted out, suggesting, as Bergson has admirably put 
it, the substitution for the complete world of experience 
of a set of kinematographic pictures. 

What then is left out of this abstract or empty 
time ? Paradoxical though it appear, what is left out, 
we shall find, are the mutually implicated facts of 
duration and change. An interval of time is not the 
same as the experience of duration, and the two 
different states situated at its extremes are no equi- 
valent for the experience of change. But these problems 
of time which we have here broached are far too 
complex for discussion now. The only farther eluci- 
dation I can offer is to raise one more question and 

w. 20 



306 Freedom and Foreknowledge 

content myself with a very summary answer. How 
do we come by this schema of time ? We come by it 
solely because our experience involves both duration 
and change ; and thus, as has been well said, " time is 
in us though we are not in time." But for experience 
duration is not something objective, is not a homo- 
geneous linear quantity that is abstracted from a 
multiplicity of presentations. What the term duration 
ultimately represents is our immediate subjective ex- 
perience as actively striving and wearing on: it implies 
the actual living, which only is actual in so far as it is 
not homogeneous and empty but full of changes endured 
or wrought. And change again as experienced is not 
merely a temporal succession, a, b, c..., where a is not 
when b is, and c is not till b is no more. Such a 
schema would never yield experience : it answers 
exactly to that zero limit of experience that, as I have 
already remarked, Leibniz ascribed to bodies, when he 
said omne corpus mens momentanea est. But experience 
yields that schema ; and empirical psychology affords 
us a fairly complete analysis of its constituents and 
a fairly probable account of their genetic synthesis. 
Experience however yields that schema only because 
experience, as living, is the natura naturans that leaves 
behind it, as it were, the natura naturata to which the 
schema entirely belongs. Between the intemporal 
world of ideas and the temporal world of phenomena 
free agents then have their place 1 . 

1 Cf. Bergson, JO Evolution creatrice, p. 391. "The feature in 
Professor Bergson's contribution to the philosophy of experience 
which distinguishes it fundamentally from the views of previous 
thinkers, is his new conception of time as concrete time, or what 



Necessitarianism so far not proved 307 

The necessitarian position is not then, we seem 
entitled to conclude, empirically warranted. As an 
argument from experience it rests on the assumption 
that phenomena are the whole ; that there is, in other 
words, nothing but filled time : whence and how time 
is filled, it does not inquire. Once this foundation is 
found faulty, all the empirical arguments that rest upon 
it may be overturned. Nor, with one exception, are 
the supposed a priori arguments more satisfactory. 
That every event must have a cause we may allow to 
be axiomatic, but not that the same cause — the same 
efficient cause, that is — must always produce the same 
effect. Again to identify such a cause with an essence, 
to equate it, as it were, to a reason was the mistake of 
rationalism, which Kant completely exposed in his 
important pre-critical paper on Negative Quantities. 

he calls Duration" (D. Balsillie, Mind, 191 1, p. 357). I think 
however that I may fairly claim to have anticipated him to some 
extent. In 1886, three years before the publication of Professor 
Bergson's Donnees, I had written a long paragraph on this topic, 
containing inter alia the following: — "Thus.. .there is an element in 
our concrete time-perception which has no place in our abstract 
conception of time. In time, conceived as physical, there is no trace 
of intensity ; in time, as psychically experienced, duration is primarily 
an intensive magnitude" (Ency. Brit. 'Psychology,' nth edn, p. 577). 
I should probably have taken an earlier opportunity of mentioning 
this point, if I had known before, that one of Professor Bergson's 
compatriots had already called attention to it — of this however I 
only became aware quite recently. Cf. M. G. Rageot in the Revue 
philosophique, t. lx. 1905, p. 84. In a reply to him Professor Bergson 
{ibid. p. 229), while establishing his own independence, strangely 
misses the point of resemblance, which is not, as he supposes, 
between my ' presentation-continuum ' and his duree reelle, but 
between this and my analysis of time as concrete. 

On the main question see further in Supplementary Note iv. 

20 — 2 



308 Freedom and Foreknowledge 

But if we start from theism the case is quite other- 
wise : then indeed the necessitarian position appears 
to be axiomatic 1 . It is, I think, generally allowed that 
in the long theological controversies, which for cen- 
turies have raged round our problem, logic has been 
on the side of those who, like Augustine, Aquinas, 
Calvin and Edwards, have maintained the doctrine of 
divine predestination, the doctrine "that God orders all 
events, and the volitions of moral agents amongst others, 
by such a decisive disposal, that the events are infallibly 
connected with his disposal 2 "; or otherwise put, that 
second causes in nature are incompatible with the admis- 
sion that there is only one cause, the First Cause. What 
however does this start from theism imply ? It implies 
a supposed knowledge of God that is independent of 
experience — partly as innate, partly as revealed. It im- 
plies further that knowing what God is apart from the 
world we infer what any world that he creates must be. 
The absolute omniscience and omnipotence of God are 
regarded as beyond question ; and from these follow as 
a corollary the absolute and eternal decrees. As 
Jonathan Edwards concisely put it : " All things are 
perfectly and equally in his view from eternity ; hence 
it will follow that his designs or purposes are not things 
formed anew, founded on any new views or appear- 
ances, but are all eternal purposes." But there is 
another corollary equally evident from which those 
intent on theism at any cost seek in vain to escape. 
There is — as already said — no room left for other 

1 So we come round again to the divergence between pluralism 
and theism from which we first set out. Cf. Lect. xin. init. 

2 Jonathan Edwards, Enquiry ■, 4th edn, 1775, p. 4° 6 - 



Necessitarianism and Theism 309 

causes, other purposes, no room for a real world with 
such a God at all. As a Scottish professor of divinity 
has said : — " If God is thus the real cause of all that is, 
the universe would seem to be merely God evolving 
himself, and there has been no true creation, no bringing 
into being of wills separate from his own 1 ." In a word — 
as I attempted to show in the second lecture — starting 
from the One there is no arriving at the Many. If we 
attempt to conceive of God apart from the world there 
is nothing to lead us on to the idea of creation. On 
the other hand, if we start from the Many, it has, I 
trust, become more and more clear as we have ad- 
vanced, that we find there no justification for the notion 
of a ' block universe' — as Professor James called it — a 
universe, that is, in which every detail is decreed, in 
which real initiative, evolution as we understand it, is 
impossible. But, in fact, we have to start from the 
Many, and accordingly always do — this too I trust has 
been made clear. Moreover, if thorough-going deter- 
minism were true, we should, it has seemed equally 
clear, never attain to the idea of a Creator at all. For 
if ourselves devoid of all originality what meaning could 
that idea have for us ? 

The doctrine of predestination has been for theo- 
logians a hopeless and insoluble problem as well as a 
source of bitter strife largely because of this opposition 
between a priori speculation and actual experience. 
''That in the actual passage of events something should 
actually come to pass, something new which previ- 
ously was not ; that history should be something more 
than a translation into time of the eternally complete 
1 Rev. Marcus Dods, Ency. Brit. 9th edn, s.v. Predestination. 



310 Freedom and Foreknowledge 

content of an ordered world — this," said Lotze, " is 
a deep and irresistible demand of our spirit, under 
the influence of which we all act in life. Without its 
satisfaction the world would be, not indeed unthinkable 
and self-contradictory, but unmeaning and incredible 1 ." 
But though I have used that ominous word 'pre- 
destination ' I am not going to attempt to adjudicate 
the theological differences of Augustine and Pelagius, 
Arminius and Calvin. It is the wider issue — that of 
reconciling pluralism and theism — that alone concerns 
us. Nevertheless there are two or three points con- 
nected with the purely theological controversy that are 
worthy of notice. First, in its most rigid and, as it 
seems to me, its most logical form — in what is called 
Supralapsarianism — the dogma of predestination has 
always appeared so shocking, so ' excruciating ' as 
Augustine said, to ordinary humanity, that it has not 
only been charged on moral grounds with tending to 
atheism, but it has been used either openly or covertly 
to promote atheism. Readers of church history will 
remember the fates of Gottschalk and Vanini. But, 
secondly and as more important, we may notice the 
attempts that have been made to tone down the ex- 
treme rigour of the Calvinistic dogma — as represented, 
for example, in Jonathan Edwards's classical treatise — 
by distinguishing between the divine prescience and 
the divine purposes. The text of all such attempts is 
to be found in a famous saying of Origen : — " Gods 
prescience is not the cause of things future, but their 
being future is the cause of God's prescience that they 
will be." To the relations of finite beings this dis- 
1 Metaphysic, § 65, E. t. p. 117. 



The Predestinarian Controversy 311 

tinction is certainly applicable. I may confidently 
expect what another will do, without any responsibility 
for his deed ; but in proportion as he has become what 
he is through my deliberate influence and effort the 
distinction lapses : so far, what I expect is just what I 
intended. If then the divine decrees and the divine 
prescience are coeval, if God is the sole cause of all 
that is and foresees infallibly all that can ever happen, 
a fortiori it seems futile to attempt to discriminate 
between what he decrees and what he merely 
permits. 

The philosopher Reid, who in opposition to 
Priestley attempted to reconcile divine foreknowledge 
and human freedom, made the extraordinary blunder 
of comparing foreknowledge of the future with memory 
of the past. He practically assumed that because 
memory of the past is memory of what was once both 
future and contingent, the fact remembered remains 
contingent though it is future no more. Nothing is 
easier than to turn this analogy against him with fatal 
effect, as his own disciple Hamilton has actually done. 
"Factum infectum reddere, ne Deus quidem potest, has 
been said and sung in a thousand forms," says Hamilton. 
The past that is to say is necessary : if then God's 
prescience resembles our memory, it is only because 
the past and the future are both alike to him : as the 
past is not contingent so neither is the future 1 . 

But notwithstanding his exposure, Hamilton still 
sides with Reid, not with Priestley. And this brings 
to our notice another attempt to save the Divine 
Sovereignty, as it is called, without surrendering the 

1 The Works of Thos. Reid, Hamilton's edition, p. 63 1 n. 



312 Freedom and Foreknowledge 

freedom of man ; and that is the simple declaration 
that the problem is transcendent. The conciliation of 
divine foreknowledge and human freedom is, said 
Hamilton, "one of the things to be believed, not 
understood": all "attempts to harmonize these anti- 
logies by human reasoning to human understanding " 
are to be rejected as " futile...' vain wisdom all and 
false philosophy.'" But what if antilogy is only a 
euphemism for contradiction, and what of the logical 
cogency of the predestinarian view, about which, 
however repulsive, there is nothing obscure or in- 
conceivable ? I do not think Jonathan Edwards 
overstated his case, when he said : — " There is no 
geometrical theorem whatsoever, more capable of 
strict demonstration than that God's certain Prescience 
of the volitions of moral agents is inconsistent with 
such a contingency of these events, as is without all 
Necessity 1 ." 

The pluralist then, it would seem, has no alternative 
but either to deny the complete prescience of the One 
or to abandon the self-determination of the Many, and 
thus wholly surrender his own position. There is 
however still an old attempt at conciliation, recently 
set forth anew by a former Gifford Lecturer, which we 
perhaps ought not to pass altogether without notice. 
"Foreknowledge in time," says Professor Royce, "is 
possible only of the general and of the causally pre- 
determined, and not of the unique and the free. Hence 
neither God nor man can perfectly foreknow, at any 
temporal moment, what a free-will agent is yet to do. 
On the other hand, the Absolute possesses a perfect 
1 Op. cit. p. 182. 



Attempts at a Conciliation 313 

knowledge at one glance of the whole of the temporal 
order, present, past and future. This knowledge is 
ill-called foreknowledge. It is eternal knowledge 1 ." 
But I fear that even eternity will not afford a secure 
refuge from the difficulty. It is noteworthy that, while 
it is of God that Professor Royce denies perfect fore- 
knowledge, it is of the Absolute that he asserts eternal 
knowledge. There is here more than an accidental 
difference of expression. Professor Royce in fact, like 
only too many theists, is guilty of that vacillation 
between God and the Absolute which Mr Bradley we 
found quaintly comparing to the futile attempts of a 
dog to follow two masters 2 . The Absolute must be in 
every respect all-inclusive, but God, if his creatures are 
free, is so far not all-inclusive. As I have already said 
the Creator together w T ith his creatures may be called 
the Absolute ; but unless the creatures — said to be 
made out of nothing — verily remain themselves but 
nothing, God is, no longer at any rate, the Absolute. 
To God we may attribute personality and therefore 
experience and knowledge ; since for him the world 
is a Not-self, although his own creation. But we 
cannot attribute personality to the Absolute, for there 
the duality of Self and Not-self is necessarily tran- 
scended. We cannot then speak of the Absolute as 
knowing ; but since it is all-inclusive we may perhaps 
say that it ' possesses knowledge ' — a vague phrase 
that will mean too little to help us much 3 . 

1 The World and the Individual, vol. n. p. 374. Italics the author's. 

2 Cf. Lect. 11. p. 24.1JIJ 

3 It would be equally true to say, as Mr Bosanquet has observed, 
that it possesses colour. 



314 Freedom and Foreknowledge 

But if now we turn for a moment to consider what 
Professor Royce understands by an eternal knowledge 
that takes in 'at a glance ' — the expression is odd — 
the whole temporal order — again an odd but significant 
expression — we shall find that in fact we are not helped 
at all. He distinguishes two senses of present, an 
exclusive — as when we hear or apprehend a musical 
air note by note, where each note excludes the rest 
from coexistence with itself — and an inclusive — as 
when we take in or comprehend the melody as a 
whole and appreciate it. In this latter case the whole 
melody is present, included at once in what I have 
called a time perspective. The range of such inclusive 
present, or time-span, is for us extremely limited, but 
within such limits we experience a sort of temporal 
ubiquity. As I have already had occasion to observe, 
when this limit is reduced to zero, there is strictly no 
experience. Now, on the other hand, imagine all 
limits withdrawn and you have the sort of experience 
Professor Royce calls eternal knowledge. Comparing 
the whole temporal order to an infinite symphony, he 
holds that the Absolute knows it at once as we might 
know one brief rhythm. But now, we ask, when is it 
that we grasp this rhythm as an ordered whole ? When 
it is complete — a pai'te post. And here surely the fatal 
defect of Professor Royce's solution for our purpose is 
evident. No wonder he talks of ' the temporal order' 
as if it were fixed ! If the Absolute takes in at a 
glance the whole temporal order of the world, it 
can only be, according to Professor Royce's analogy, 
because, as Hegel supposed, the world's evolution is for 
it merely a rehearsal after the symphony is composed. 



The Pluralist 's Via Media 315 

But such an absolute One, as we have seen many 
times over, has no need and leaves no room for a 
real Many at all. Further, it seems contradictory to 
attribute to it the limitations of the temporal stand- 
point along with the perfection of the eternal 1 : the 
composer can never be a mere auditor too. 

This remark brings us back to the pluralisms 
solution, and raises an obvious difficulty. Is God 
then not the composer it will reasonably be asked: are 
we not assuming that the world is his creation ? Or 
has he only devised an /Eolian harp and left the winds 
of chance to call the tune, being himself then only an 
auditor ? Such questions suggest two extremes, neither 
of which is compatible with pluralism ; between which 
however there lies a via media that may be. All is 
not decreed : the world is not created like a symphony. 
Again, all possibilities are not left open : the Many 
have not severally unlimited freedom, that ' freedom of 
indifference ' which is indistinguishable from chance. 
God's creatures are creators, the pluralist maintains : 
their 'nature' is partly his doing, partly their own: 
he assigns the talents, they use or misuse them. 
Not everything that is possible is possible to any, 
yet some initiative is open to every one : none are 
left with no talent at all. The total possibilities then, 
however far back we go, are fixed ; but within these, 
contingencies, however far forward we go, are open. 

" An infinite Mind, with prevision thus extended 
beyond all that is to all that can be," said Martineau, 
"is lifted above surprise or disappointment... yet, in- 
stead of being shut up in a closed and mechanized 
1 See Supplementary Note iv. 



316 Freedom and Foreknowledge 

universe, lives amid the free play of variable character 
and contingent history. Is this a limitation of God's 
foresight, that he cannot read all volitions that are to 
be? Yes, but it is a self limitation...', lending us a 
portion of his causation, he refrains from covering all 

with his omniscience " "There is no absurdity in 

supposing," said Dugald Stewart, "that the Deity may, 
for wise purposes, have chosen to open a source of 
contingency in the voluntary action of his creatures, to 
which no prescience can possibly extend." " God who 
is everything," said Jowett, "is not really so much as 
if He allowed the most exalted free agencies to exist 
side by side with Him." " Free will," said Tennyson, 
"was undoubtedly the main miracle, apparently an act 
of self-limitation by the Infinite, and yet a revelation 
by Himself and of Himself 1 ." — A much longer catena 
of passages similar in purport could easily be provided. 
As a consequence of the growing acceptance of the 
pluralistic standpoint, this admission of what is very 
inaccurately styled the ' doctrine of a finite God 2 ' has 
become widely prevalent of late. It has its difficulties, 
no doubt, as the idea of creation for us must always 
have. But, on the other hand, by means of it, the 
problem of evil, to which I propose to invite your 
attention next, is greatly simplified. 

1 In Memoriam, Robinson's edition, p. 260. 

2 Cf. below, Lect. xx. 



LECTURE XV. 

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND PESSIMISM. 

The problem of evil has been recently called ' the 
crux of theism': the phrase serves to emphasise how 
thought has moved on since Leibniz, the philosopher 
and courtier, in obedience to royal orders wrote his 
famous Theodicy — a piece of ' superficiality incarnate,' 
Wm James has ventured to call it. Nowadays it 
is asked : How is the evil in the world compatible 
with there being a God at all ? For Leibniz the 
existence of God was demonstrable : thus for him the 
problem was simply to show that this world is the best 
possible. Whether he succeeded or not, it may fairly 
be maintained that, his main premises granted, no 
other reasonable supposition is possible. God would 
not be God, if his world were not the best. Even 
Hume explicitly admitted this. "There are," he says, 
"many inexplicable difficulties in the works of Nature, 
which, if we allow a perfect author to be proved 

a priori become only seeming difficulties for the 

narrow capacity of man, who cannot trace infinite 
relations." And again, after a lengthy summary of 
the circumstances on which natural evil in the main 
depends, he continues : " Shall we say that these 
circumstances are not necessary and that they might 



318 The Problem of Evil and Pessimism 



u^ 



easily have been altered in the contrivance of the 
universe ? This decision seems too presumptuous for 
creatures so blind and ignorant. Let us be more 
modest in our conclusions. Let us allow that, if the 
goodness of the Deity.... could be established on any 
tolerable reasons a priori, these phenomena, however 
untoward, would not be sufficient to subvert that prin- 
ciple ; but might easily, in some unknown manner, be 
reconcilable to it 1 ." And in fact this position is one 

\ continually adopted. Lotze, for example, holds fast to 
^ ( the goodness of God and so — while frankly admitting 
that for our finite wisdom the problem of evil is inso- 
luble — rests satisfied that there is a solution, though we 
do not understand it 2 . 

But if we start from the evil that for our immediate 
experience seems really beyond question, it may be 
contended that the solution should come first, and that 
without this the thejstic position is not only beyond proof, 

/ but impossible. It now becomes utterly futile to represent 
evil as essentially negative and unreal, however forcible 
in other respects this time-honoured argument may be. 
For immediate experience what is evil is just as real and 
positive as its contrary good. Again, from the pluralistic 
point of view it seems a useless mockery of the Many 
not a vindication of the One to put Leibniz into verse, 
as Pope did, and declare 'all partial evil universal good.' 
So long as the evil that I suffer brings no good to me, 
furthers nothing that I approve, so long God will not 
be God for me ; on the other hand in proportion as I 

1 Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, Green and Grose's edn, 
vol. ii. pp. 412, 451 ; cf. also pp. 444 ff. 

2 Cf. Microcosmus, Eng. trans, vol. 11. p. 717. 



The only Theodicy open to us 319 

discern a soul of good in things evil I may bless and 
trust him though he slay me. Complete certainty one 
way implies complete certainty the other : God and 
Evil, in a word, are contraries : if the problem of evil 
is altogether insoluble, there is an end of theism : if 
God exists, there is nothing absolutely evil. 

But it is important here to bear in mind a distinction 
on which Kant was wont to lay much stress : failure of 
proof is very different from disproof. It may be that 
in this life we shall ever fall as far short of a triumphant 
and definitive theodicy as we have of a rigidly demon- 
strative theology. But scepticism is not atheism : where 
there is room for doubt there is 'room for faith.' At any 
rate one thing seems clear : whatever be the details of 
the divine vindication it must show that at least the 
possibility of evil is essential to the world's perfection ; 
and even if we cannot show this completely and in every 
case, yet to prove the contrary, it may be maintained, is 
equally impossible. Now at the outset of our inquiry we 
came to the conclusion that the theistic ideal, if it can 
be sustained, would add immeasurably to the worth of 
the world as pluralism alone has to conceive it. But 
we have found no theoretical proof of the divine exist- 
ence and cannot therefore directly outflank the so-called 
enigma of evil as an empirical problem. The problem 
then for us seems to formulate itself in this wise : — 
Granting that if there is a God, this world must be not 
only good but — so far as it is his creation — the best 
possible, have we any certain evidence that it is not ? 
Keeping strictly on the defensive the only theodicy we 
can attempt is to require those who accuse to prove 
their indictment. 



^, 






320 The Problem of Evil and Pessimism 

The pessimists with their contention that the world 
is the worst possible or absolutely bad confront us first. 
A distinction is sometimes made between those who 
are pessimists by temperament and those who are pes- 
simists on purely theoretical grounds, as the result of 
dispassionate inquiry and conviction ; but in truth I 
doubt if there has ever been a pronounced pessimist 
who could be placed in the latter class alone. Schopen- 
hauer and Mainlander, who are accounted philosophers, 
were every whit as morbid as Byron or Leopardi. The 
pessimist sees the world not by the dry, objective light 
of reason, but rather looks out upon it through the 
subjective humours of his own sickly 'pity for himself.' 
This leads him to magnify or even enjoy whatever misery, 
to minimize and perhaps envy whatever happiness, he 
finds without 1 . How can we accept the evidence of 
such diseased and pusillanimous souls, or trust the 
theories they propound ? But the temperamental op- 
timist, it may be said, is at least as one-sided, and the 
theoretical optimist is far more superficial. Not only 
is that true, but it is true further, as has been often 
urged, that the jubilant and fatuous optimism of the 
eighteenth century helped to bring into vogue the 
pessimism of the nineteenth, and even justified it as 
at least a salutary reaction. When the actual evil in 
the world is compared to the shadows in a picture, or 
to the dissonances in a sonata, that only enhance the 
aesthetic perfection of the whole, it is surely reasonable 

1 " I rejoice to discover more and more the misery of men and 
things, to touch them with the hand and to be seized with a cold 
shudder as I search through the unblessed and terrible secret of life." 
Leopardi, quoted by Sully, Pessimism, 2nd edn, 1892, p. 27. 



Pessimism as a Reaction 321 

to insist on the one thing immediately certain, the 
inherent badness of these blemishes and discords as 
such. It is surely reasonable too to argue that if the 
actual evil of the world is part of its perfection as a 
whole, then to replace it by good, to change actual 
misery into happiness, actual vice into virtue, would 
only diminish not increase the world's perfection — a 
redttctio ad absurdum, if ever there was one 1 . No 
wonder that such shallow formalism should strike 
earnest men as insincere 2 . " I cannot refrain from 
declaring," said Schopenhauer, "that to me optimism 
appears not merely as an absurd but as a positively 
wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the 
unspeakable suffering of mankind — anyhow," he con- 
tinues, " let no one perchance suppose that the teaching 
of Christianity favours optimism ; for on the contrary 
in the Gospels 'world' and 'evil' are used almost as 
synonymous expressions 3 ." Yes, but world in the New 
Testament does not mean the whole sum of things but 
only 'the things seen and temporal,' the natural without 
the spiritual. 

And here we touch upon the point in which optimism 
and pessimism are equally at fault. The one seeks to 
show that this world is, to use Wallace's phrase, ' a feli- 
cific institution,' the other has no difficulty in showing 
that it is not ; and therefore, since both start from the 

1 Cf. H. Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil, 1907, vol. n. 
pp. 242 f. 

2 Several writers have maintained that Leibniz was not sincere 
and one even went so far as to say that Leibniz both in writing and 
in conversation admitted as much. Cf. O. Willareth, Die Lehre vom 
Uebel bet Leibniz, Strassburg, 1898, p. 12. 

3 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Bk ill. § 59. 

w. 21 



322 The 1 Problem of Evil and Pessimism 




same eudaemonistic premisses, the pessimist claims to 
have won his suit, and disposed of the old theodicies 
and theologies altogether. Pessimism has certainly 
shown, as Wallace said, " that he who makes happiness 
the aim of his life is on the wrong tack," but then 
rational ethics, which is not pessimistic, also allows 
that. In bringing home to our modern consciousness 
the hopelessness of the hedonistic theories of this life 
that had dominated the thinking of the eighteenth 
century, pessimism then, we must admit, has been of 
lasting service. But deliberately, as Schopenhauer 
does, to endorse Byron's petulant stanza, 

Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, 
Count o'er thy days from anguish free, 

And know, whatever thou hast been, 
Tis something better not to be; 

to maintain, whatever a man is, that in proportion 
as his life fails of pleasure it fails in worth, is to make 
a great assumption which experience does not bear out. 
That a world of happiness unalloyed, were it possible, 
would be the best — though so widely held — is just the 
position that we must presently carefully examine. 
But before we attempt to discuss this dogma common 
to optimism and pessimism alike 1 , it will be worth our 
while to subject the subsequent steps in the pessimist's 
argument to some criticism. 

Optimists were fond of saying that pleasure is 
positive and pain negative : Schopenhauer's first step 
is to assert that, on the contrary, pain is positive and 
i ■ pleasure negative. Perfect and continuous happiness 
would then have the value zero : there would be no 
pain. "Whatever is opposed to our will, thwarting 
1 Cf. below, Lect. xvi. pp. 337 ff. 



Schopenhauer on Feeling and Will 323 

and resisting it, that is, whatever is displeasing and 
painful — of all this," he says, " we are directly sensitive, 
at once and very distinctly : [on the other hand] we do 
not feel the healthfulness of our whole body, but only 
the one spot ' where the shoe pinches ' ; so also we do 
not think about the state of our affairs in general, so 
long as all goes perfectly well, but only about some 
insignificant trifle or other that annoys us. On this 
ground," he continues, " is based the negativity of 
well-being and happiness in contrast to the positivity 
of pain, upon which I have so often insisted 1 ." Pes- 
simism based on the crumpled rose-leaf we might say : 
could anything be more perverse ! We cannot indeed 
forget the harrowing pictures that Schopenhauer loved 
to draw of all the vast and varied ills of life. But this 
after all is not the point. He tells us, for example, 
that " if we could even approximately conceive the 
sum of want and pain and misery of every sort on 
which in its course the sun daily shines, we should 
acknowledge that it would have been better if the 
earth like the moon had been but a lifeless mass 2 ." 
But he forgets that such a conclusion would only be 
forced upon us if we accepted his assumptions. Grant 
that all the good the sun sees counts for nothing, lies 
below the threshold, as we now say, and that only the 
evil is positive for us ; then we might agree with him. 
Nay, if his psychology of will is sound, we must in 
any case do so. For "all volition," he maintained, 
"springs from want, implies defect and therefore 
suffering." Yet lasting satisfaction and contentment 

1 Parerga und Paralipomefia, Bd II. § 150. 

2 Op. cit. § 157 init. 

21 — 2 



fV, 



324 The Problem of Evil and Pessimism 

are impossible, since fresh wants and new disappoint- 
ments arise continually. From the lowest stages of its 
manifestation to the highest, the will altogether lacks 
any definite end or aim : it is simply ever striving after 
something, for in such striving its whole essence lies. 
To look for meaning or progress in life or history is 
then absurd. " So the subject of volition lies per- 
manently on the revolving wheel of Ixion, pours for 
ever into the Danaids' sieve, is Tantalus eternally 
yearning 1 ." In a word, A lies Leben ist Leiden. 
Whether Schopenhauer has succeeded better in prov- 
ing the good in the world to be negative than Leibniz 
in proving this of the evil in it, is a question. Certainly 
if the rosy pictures of the one are not decisive neither 
is the gallery of horrors of the other. But till Schopen- 
hauer's psychology of feeling and will is established, so 
long his pessimism will lack the foundation upon which 
he himself professed to rest it. This is the point on 
which I would now insist, the point which Schopen- 
hauer's readers, carried away by his masterly delinea- 
tions of human ill, are only too apt to overlook. 

His follower, von Hartmann, however allows — 
what indeed there is no denying — that pleasure 
and pain are alike positive, and also that there is 
progress and development in the world : he even 
takes some trouble expressly to refute Schopenhauer's 
teaching in these respects. Nevertheless he holds 
Schopenhauer's pessimism to have been in the main 
justifiable ; for he claims to show that there is a 
preponderance of evil in the world, a preponderance 
too that steadily increases as the world's evolution 
1 Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, §§ 38, 56. 



Von HartmantCs Inductions 325 

proceeds. He professes to prove this, first inductively 
as a fact, from an exhaustive survey of experience ; 
and secondly deductively, as a necessary consequence 
from established psychological and ethical principles. 

The empirical survey he regards as essentially a 
matter of accounts : just as we might proceed to 
ascertain whether there are more apples or more pears 
on a given table, so, he says, we must proceed to 
strike a balance between the amount of pleasure and 
the amount of pain in the world at a given time ; and 
then, comparing successive balance sheets, we shall see 
which way the world is tending. Here again as with 
Schopenhauer we notice the failure to distinguish 
between pleasure and worth : the "contented pig is 
after all better off, it would seem, than the aspiring 
philosopher, since he suffers less. However, leaving 
this all-important distinction aside and keeping strictly 
to the question immediately raised — Is the algebraic 
sum of pleasure and pain in the world positive or 
negative ? — we have to ask how this sum is to be 
worked out. It is not simply a question of counting, 
as Hartmann's trivial reference to apples and pears 
assumes, it is a question of measuring. How are we 
to find the quantity that admits of common measure ? 
I can think of but one way. " Like brain vibrations," ^ 
says Hartmann, " call forth in all individuals like sen- 
sations." At any rate there is a fundamental continuity 
in all protoplasm, so that like functions have everywhere 
like characteristics. Regarded from this side pains are 
but the subjective concomitant of disturbed function : 
already the physiologist can frequently estimate the 
amount of this disturbance, and as knowledge advances 



V- 



326 The Problem of Evil and Pessimism 

physiology will doubtless become more and more a 
quantitative science. All the pain in the world seems 
unquestionably correlated to physiological process, of 
which protoplasm is the common basis. Here then, 
I say, there does seem to be some chance of working 
out Hartmann's hedonistic balance sheet. But again 
from the physiological standpoint it is unquestionable 
that pain as disturbance of function is abnormal, the 
exception rather than the rule. Pleasure in general 
tends to enhance and promote life, pain to diminish 
and extinguish it. If the abnormal really prepon- 
derated, were in fact the normal, the world could 
hardly have advanced so far. The most hopeful 
method for his purpose then can hardly justify the 
conclusion to which Hartmann professes to be led. 

But he preferred to work from the subjective 
standpoint : here, however, he acknowledges two un- 
deniable difficulties. Let us see how he meets them. 
First, the estimate of the pure pleasure-pain total of 
two subjective states is more uncertain the more diverse 
they are. Accordingly he proposes ' as far as possible ' 
to leave such comparisons aside and to be content with 
' a special balance ' for each class of feelings separately. 
"If now," he winds up by saying, "it turns out that 
every one of these classes apart yields a negative 
result, all need for an estimation of one against the 
other is entirely avoided : since all the negative special 
results simply add up to a negative total." //"all turn 
out as supposed this is beautifully simple, of course: there 
seems no need even to add ; and, by the way, adding 
is still impossible without a common unit. But then, 
so far as I can learn, neither Hartmann nor anyone 



Hedonistic 'Balance-sheets' 327 

else has ever so much as attempted to work these 
special sums 1 . But secondly, there is 'the still greater 
difficulty ' of estimatiflg'the sensations of different sub- 
jects, one against the other. To avoid this, however, 
we are told again, is easy: "one strikes the personal 
balance of his life for every individual, and since all 
come out negative, one has only to add them up to 
reach the universal world-balance." The preliminary 
'if is here dispensed with and the result straightway 
assumed. Identifying the supposed solubility of the 
question with its actual solution in favour of pessimism, 
Hartmann expresses surprise that empirical pessimism 
is nevertheless combated so much. But this opposition 
is partly explicable, he thinks, ' from the psychological 
motives and the sources of error incident to the working 
out of each one's own balance 2 !'. A good specimen 
this of that charming naivetd, for which Hartmann is 
unsurpassed. Remembering that Hartmann elsewhere 
has thought it advisable to " meet the suspicion that 
his pessimistic proclivities are due to a gloomy personal 
experience, by means of a pleasant little sketch of his 
home life, lit up by the presence of a sympathetic wife, 
of a beautiful engaging boy... and of a few congenial 
friends 3 ," one naturally wonders how far 'psychological 
motives,' how far the inevitable 'errors' contributed to 

1 The superficial character of the summary which Hartmann's 
disciple, A. Drews, gives of this 'empirical proof of pessimism is 
noteworthy. Cf. his Eduard von Hartmann s philosophisches System 
im Grundriss, 2te Ausg., 1906, pp. 320-2. 

2 "Zur Pessimismus-Frage," Philosophische Monatshefte, xix. 79 f. 
Italics mine. This article is republished in Hartmann's Philosophische 
Zeitfragen. 

3 Sully, Pessimism, 1st edn, p. 114. 



t 



328 The Problem of Evil and Pessimism 

perturb his balance. At any rate he provides himself 
with an interesting dilemma. 

We may now inquire whether Hartmann is more 
convincing when he attempts to deduce pessimism 
from psychological principles. Here he is substantially 
at one with Schopenhauer and we may deal with both 
together. Both alike on the one hand confound all 
psychical activity with will and on the other identify 
will exclusively with desire. In the first sense both 
presentation and feeling would presuppose will, since 
they both imply psychical activity or life. But the 
converse would be true when will is restricted to the 
narrower sense of desire. Desire does not merely give 
rise to feeling ; it also presupposes it ; we do not want 
and then feel pain, but rather feel pain and then and 
there want its removal. Further and more important — 
so far as feeling is antecedent to pursuit — there may 
be pleasurable feelings which cannot be what Schopen- 
hauer called negative, the mere filling up of a want, for 
they may come without our striving and be wholly 
unforeseen. We do not need to cite only such rare 
cases of good fortune as unexpected legacies or sudden 
unearned increments : there are few lives without any 
agreeable disappointments, any halcyon days, golden 
opportunities, or runs of luck. It is not only the lilies 
of the field that are clothed, though they toil not neither 
do they spin. Finally — and as the fundamental fact 
in the whole matter — spontaneity and an unimpeded 
energy, that is for a time at least self-sustaining, are 
sources of pleasure and well being to most creatures 
during a large part of their lives, quite apart from desire 
or antecedent pain. In a word absolute privation, like 



Pain, Desire and Will 329 

absolute negation, is unthinkable : the world cannot 
begin in utter bankruptcy without any assets. Hart- 
mann's initial state of the Absolute as empty will is 
the most glaring contradiction of a writer who has 
perpetrated more absurdities than any other writer of 
repute that I know. How, it has been often asked, 
can the Absolute lack anything ? And how too, we 
may add, can the finite Many, if parts of the Absolute, 
lack everything ? Only to him that hath can be given : 
we cannot therefore equate life with privation, resolve 
all activity into desire nor all pleasure into the mere 
cessation of the pain to which unsatisfied desire gives 
rise. 

But it is not even true that wherever there is desire 
there is pain. The huntsman, for example, only desires 
to catch the fox because of the pleasure of the pursuit ; 
and, in general, we account that man happy who can 
follow his favourite pursuit ; for " it is not the goal, but 
the course which makes us happy," as Jean Paul Richter 
said. Still without 'progressive attainment' there would 
be no pleasure in pursuit 1 ; and if will were nothing but 
desire, we should be as much at the mercy of vain 
desires, as Schopenhauer and von Hartmann suppose. 
But grown men are not the slaves of endless whimsies, 
they are not ever crying for the moon like a spoiled 
child. Again, strictly speaking, to will is not to desire \V 
but rather to control desires : its sphere is possible 
action and its essential characteristic, even according 
to Schopenhauer, is not want but energy. " We exist \ 
only as we energise ; pleasure is the reflex of unimpeded 

1 To have insisted on this point, overlooked by Sidgwick, is a 
merit of Professor Mackenzie's Manual of Ethics ; cf. ch. vi. Note I. 



33° The Problem of Evil and Pessimism 

energy ; energy is the means by which our faculties are 
developed ; and a higher energy the end which, develop- 
ment proposes. I n action is thus contained the existence, 
happiness, improvement and perfection of our being 1 ." 
These words of Hamilton are but an echo of the teach- 
ing of Aristotle, with which the teaching of Kant and 
Fichte had much in common. But now it was from 
Kant and Fichte that Schopenhauer and von Hartmann 
derived their doctrine of the primacy of will, a doctrine 
incompatible, as we have seen, with the identification 
of will and desire. Unless this identification is true, 
the pessimism is groundless, which they rest upon it. 
The question of its truth or falsity is one for psychology, 
and I can only say that I do not know of a single 
psychologist who would uphold it. 

In spite of pluming themselves on the inductive 
and scientific character of their method, Schopenhauer 
and von Hartmann have perhaps surpassed the most 
' romantic ' of their countrymen in the wildness of their 
metaphysical speculations : here, if anywhere, we have 
mysticism and mythology in excelsis. And it is in 
ihese metaphysical speculations that their identification 
of will with blind desire, and the consequent complete 
separation between will and idea, work out their own 
refutation. Let error but develop a outrance and it 
explodes itself. This truth, which, as we shall see, is 
for Hartmann the golden thread of his pessimism, 
applies — as perhaps it ought to do — to his own meta- 
physics. "If will as such is blind how shall it in 
willing come by sight ? If as will it is endless, irrational 
impulse, how shall it in willing be other than just as 
1 Sir W. Hamilton, Discussions on Philosophy, etc., p. 40. 






Hartmann s questions to Schopenhauer 331 

endless and irrational ? How shall what is aimless set 
to work to give itself an aim 1 ? " These are the ques- 
tions which Hartmann addresses to Schopenhauer, and 
which he rightly enough maintains Schopenhauer did 
not and could not answer. 

Let us see how he answers them himself. Schopen- 
hauer, he says, failed to reach the rational ; Hegel, to 
reach the real. By combining the Panthelismus of 
the one with the Panlogismus of the other, Hartmann 
claims to have corrected the one-sidedness of both ; 
and thus, in place of an Absolute that is only Will or 
only Idea, to reach an Absolute Spirit of which both 
will and idea are the attributes. The only objection 
he finds to calling this Absolute Spirit God, as Spinoza 
did, " lies in the exclusively religious origin " of that 
term. Such an all-powerful, all-wise Being could, if 
he would, we should suppose, create a world that is 
not only the best possible but absolutely good, not a 
world, th'at, though the best possible, is irretrievably 
bad. How came Hartmann, who seems to begin by 
agreeing so far with the optimist's views concerning 
God and the world, nevertheless to end by siding with 
the pessimist ? Unlike Leibniz and theists generally, 
Hartmann, as is fitting in a romantic philosopher, 
starts his philosophy not with a theology but with a 
theogony. Here we shall find the answer to our ques- 
tions. Before time was — filled time that is to say — 
Thought or the Idea in the Absolute was only ' latent' 
and could not of itself pass over into actual existence, 
and Will was only potential, had only the capacity 

1 " Ueber die nothwendige Umbildung der Schopenhauerschen 
Philosophic," Philosophische Monatshefte, 1867, 11. p. 465. 



332 The Problem of Evil and Pessimism 

of willing or not willing ' according to circumstances.' 
How there can be circumstances where there is no 
actual being we will not stop to inquire. Actual 
willing requires a content and this only the Idea can 
give — the sine qua non of actual willing thus lies outside 
of the Will as such. But in that case how with only 
pure latency on the one side and only pure potentiality 
on the other did actual willing ever arise ? A single bare 
possibility cannot advance to reality, how is the case 
mended if there are two ? 

Here is the Achilles' heel of all Absolutist specula- 
tion as it appears in the speculation of Hartmann. The 
jump into existence that he denies to Hegel's Idea is, 
he thinks, less of a jump in the case of Will, to which, 
after all, ' initiative ' essentially belongs. Between the 
state of rest — and blessedness — of the mere potentiality 
to will or not and actual, determinate, willing with a con- 
tent, there comes ' empty willing,' the mere initiative 
of willing to will — a state of " absolute unblessedness, 
torment without pleasure and without pause." And 
now, since Will and Idea are both but attributes of 
the same Absolute Spirit, the Idea cannot for a 
moment withhold itself or escape when the empty 
Will lays violent hands upon it. But if the empty 
Will can thus secure its object the instant the impulse 
arises, why lay stress on its ceaseless and infinite pain, 
what ground is there for extending pessimism even to 
the Absolute? It is in answer to this question that 
Schopenhauer speaks through Hartmann. Will is 
everywhere infinite, so it is necessarily insatiable ; 
since a completed infinite is logically impossible, is 
a content therefore that the Idea cannot supply. Let 



Hartmann' s Theogony and Cosmogony 333 

the world be never so good, and it is the best possible, 
yet beyond the world, for God himself, there is only 
absolute pain and unblessedness. This can only cease 
when the willing to will itself ceases. 

It is God then who more even than the world 
needs deliverance from evil. Even granting, as 
Hartmann maintains, that this willing to will on the 
part of the Absolute was a piece of absolute stupidity — 
and if stupid at all, we must perhaps assume that the 
Absolute is absolutely stupid — still, since it is just as 
truly absolutely wise 1 , will it then not at once retrieve 
the blunder ? At least it will retrieve it, Hartmann 
assures us. But how often do we find that a momentary 
folly on the part of one person takes another years to 
undo ! The Absolute is in a like predicament : the 
whole world must run its course before the divine fall 
can be redeemed and the blind aimless will cease from 
troubling and be again at rest. This purely negative 
outcome is the supreme goal of the world as a realm 
of ends. But " how shall what is aimless set to work to 
give itself an end?" was, as we have seen, the question 
Hartmann proposed to Schopenhauer. 

And now at length we reach his own answer : Were 
the Absolute only Will the thing would be impossible ; 
but it is also Idea and as such provides the end. Like 
Hegel he believes in the 'absolute cunning of reason.' 
The Idea is powerless to resist the sort of rape, which 
he supposes the will to perpetrate, but it takes care 

1 The remark that used to be made of Charles II., "he never 
said a foolish thing and never did a wise one," seems true also 
of the Absolute, according to Hartmann. As Will it is absolutely 
stupid, as Idea absolutely wise. 



334 The Problem of Evil and Pessimism 

that at least the offspring shall be such as to put a 
term to the paternal folly. For though "the world 
gets its ' that ' from the father, its ' what ' and ' how ' 
come from its mother" says Hartmann, adopting an 
old conceit of Goethe's, which Schopenhauer professed 
to explain 1 . It does not concern us now to examine in 
detail this process of deliverance from evil, ' e volutional 
optimism' as Hartmann had the effrontery to call it: 
enough to note that its one essential feature is the 
evolution of self-conscious beings whose wills are not 
blind and aimless. These, as they advance in intel- 
ligence, must realise more and more distinctly the 
irrationality of the positive will to be, and — as negative 
will not to be — must finally suppress it. Hartmann is 
frank enough to confess that no apocalyptic vision of 
the final scene has been vouchsafed him ; so he can 
only vaguely conjecture under what conditions it would 
even be possible 2 . One preliminary, however, is certain: 
the world must first be reduced to a state of rational 
despair. From beginning to end suffering has prepon- 
derated to an ever increasing extent, God himself or 
the Absolute Spirit being the greatest sufferer of all. 
Only through this climax of despair is release possible ; 

1 Philosophic dcs Unbewussten, 6te Aus. 1876, p. 796. 

2 Needless to say, the supposed conditions are improbable in the 
extreme. Hartmann has dilated at length on 'the three stages of 
illusion' through which the intelligent world must pass before it 
realises that positive happiness is unattainable. His one remaining 
consolation, that at least the world can then will itself out of existence, 
has been aptly called by a rival pessimist, Bahnsen, 'the fourth stage 
of illusion.' But for Hartmann, who begins by setting aside the first 
half of the old ontological maxim, Ex nihilo nihil fit, there can be 
no difficulty in setting aside the second, /;/ nihil* nil posse reverti. 

A ■ 



Hartmanris 'Evolutional Optimism' 335 

and the world with this as its goal was devised by the 
divine Wisdom as the one means of effecting its own 
deliverance. 

And when the end comes, what then ? The will 
of the Absolute is reduced again to the state of pure 
potentiality to be sure, but it has learnt nothing ; for 
it is altogether devoid of intelligence. It may then 
instantly repeat its former faux pas : also it may not. 
In place of the existing certainty of evil, there will be 
an even chance of its non-recurrence ; and this, says 
Hartmann, is " a gain not to be despised." When a 
cheerful medieval sinner was being borne away by the 
devil at the end of his earthly career, he is said to have 
exclaimed : 

Even so, of course, it might have been yet worse : 
For, though now, as you see, he's carrying me, 
An it pleased old Harry, I'd had him to carry. 

An optimist of this sort was the pessimist, Eduard von 
Hartmann. 

It is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous ; 
and this pessimism would certainly strike the stoutest 
heart with terror if it did not at once strike every sane 
mind as nonsensical. The very superfluity of its 
naughtiness embarrasses the critic. But one point at 
least stands out clear : the supposed faux pas of the 
Absolute is simply Hartmann's own fazcx pas ; and, as 
I hinted at the outset, the one like the other is its own 
undoing. Hartmann has not synthesized Hegel's 
Absolute with Schopenhauer's : he has simply set 
them over against each other in irreconcilable conflict, 
so soon and so long as they are at all. Only while 
they are bare possibilities and actually nothing can 



336 The Problem of Evil and Pessimism 

they be said to agree. Anyone, to whom it does not 
seem meaningless, may regard them in this non-existent 
state as ' subsisting ' in a single substance, but the 
moment they exist their incompatibility makes any 
real unity impossible, to say nothing of unity in one 
and the same spirit. The subtlest modal distinction 
or secundum quid will not avail to bring contradictories 
into simple unity, least of all the unity of an absolute 
Spirit who may be called God. Hartmann's God qua 
willing and absolutely irrational and his God qua 
thinking and absolutely rational may be two Gods 
perhaps, or God and something else ; but one God 
simply it cannot be. Instead of le Dieu mdchant of 
Manichaeism, what Hartmann gives us, as Secretan 
happily put it 1 , is the still greater absurdity of un 
Dieu bete. The dualism into which he is driven in 
spite of himself comes out clearly in the fine ethical 
appeal that he makes to us to sympathize and co- 
operate with God in effecting his redemption and our 
own. But surely we cannot sympathize with a God 
who is the source of all evil ; certainly we cannot 
cooperate with such a God. Moreover Hartmann 
makes a point of maintaining that for the existence 
of the world a " God as such " is not responsible : in 
this, he says, lies the superiority of his philosophy over 
that of the ordinary theist. That a mind daring — or 
shall we say, rash — enough to start from nothing or 
the other side of being and show how God came to be 
could not manage to reach a better theogony is sur- 
prising. Nevertheless Hartmann maintains that his 
speculation has a scientific basis. The truth is that 
1 Revue philosophique, 1883, x v. 395. 



Hartmann" s Scheme of Redemption 337 

it rests on the bad psychology of will which he inherited 
from his master, Schopenhauer; and,as I have said, in de- 
veloping that error a outrance he has furnished the most 
telling refutation of their common pessimism : he has 
imitated his Absolute's suicide, as Bradley would say. 

The odd thing is that almost at the close of his 
chief work Hartmann explicitly recognises the truth 
that he began by implicitly denying. " There is no 

doubt/' he says, "that a particular volition in man 

can be suppressed by the influence of conscious reason," 
not indeed directly but by the suggestion of counter 
motives 1 . And without this truth, as he expressly 
allows, his whole scheme of redemption would become 
quite impossible. But all volition is particular volition : 
volition of nothing in particular or empty volition is 
surely a veritable chimaera. If the imperfect reason of 
man can sometimes control the will, why should this 
never be possible for the all-perfect reason of God ? 
Because God is the Unconscious, perhaps one might 
expect Hartmann to reply. But no, God is omniscient, 
possessed of an intellectual intuition equivalent to an 
absolute clairvoyance not only of this world and all 
that is therein but of all possible worlds besides. Only 
to differentiate this ' Over-consciousness ' from all such 
consciousness as we can conceive is the term ' the 
Unconscious' 'temporally' applied to it. It is the 
absolute Initiative of the primordial Will that prevents 
the divine Reason from influencing it. The fateful 
deed is done before that Reason emerges from its 
pristine latency. By what good fortune then, we 
may ask, does this Will, ' unenlightened by a single 
1 Op. cit, p. 768. 

w. 2 2 



338 The Problem of Evil and Pessimism 

ray of rational intelligence ' out of all the possible 
worlds lying latent in the Idea, realise precisely that 
v one that is the best ? This is substantially the question 
> already mentioned, which Hartmann addressed in vain 
to Schopenhauer, and it now becomes clear that he can 
give no satisfactory answer to it himself. The fact 
that there is a world at all he attributes, as we have 
seen, to absolute chance. The fact that it is the best 
possible can have for him no better ground, so long 
as he refuses to extend to reason that influence over 
will in the creation of the world, which he allows is 
essential to its evolution when created. In a word 
intellectual intuition and a blind will cannot be con- 
joined. Again as severally but possibilities they can 
effect nothing. It is an error long since exploded that 
bare possibilities can precede all actuality. So then 
there is no empty will ; and no will with a content can 
\ be called blind. Thus we are entitled to conclude that, 
while their empirical pessimism is not proven, the so- 
called * metaphysical pessimism ' of Schopenhauer and 
Hartmann has no basis in experience and is but a bad 
dream. 



LECTURE XVI. 

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND OPTIMISM. 

The two leading systems of pessimism, which on 
account of their wide vogue, seemed to challenge our 
attention, deserve — most of you, I think, will allow — 
the title of irrational philosophies, which Windelband, 
a very fair and able historian of philosophy, has re- 
cently assigned to the chief of them. We may, then, 
now turn from these to consider whether other and 
less sweeping indictments against the constitution of 
the universe can be better sustained. 

First of all it is especially important, not only as 
bearing on our present problem, but also for the sake of 
our whole discussion, to examine the dogma, already re- 
ferred to as the basis of optimism and pessimism alike — 
the dogma, I mean, that an ideally perfect world would 
be one in which from first to last, permanently and 
universally, there was unmixed happiness ; in which 
physical and moral evil were alike unknown. But 
only if complete happiness were the sole end of the 
world would its continuous and universal presence 
prove that the world was perfect ; and perfect simply 
because of that. Here then there is a manifest as- 
sumption, for if happiness per se were the one supreme 
good, any conduct that conduced to it would be so far 

22 — 2 



34° The Problem of Evil and Optimism 

justified and would be otherwise without any justifica- 
tion. The only standard of right would be the hedon- 
istic one. That happiness is involved as a positive 
constituent of the supreme end, only the thorough- 
going pessimist would have the hardihood to deny. 
But that happiness per se is not the end as such, 
hedonists themselves unwittingly allow in accepting 
what Sidgwick called the ' fundamental paradox of 
hedonism.' " The impulse towards pleasure, if too 
predominant, defeats its own aim," he says 1 . Pleasure 
may come unsought but to get it we must forget it. 
But now by * aim ' or end in this connexion — practical 
end, that is to say — we mean something that we aim 
at, that we actively strive to accomplish, the consum- 
mation of some definite purpose towards which we 
direct our efforts. Hence the literal meaning of sin 
as ajjiapTia or missing the mark, on which theologians 
love to dwell. Grant that pleasure is not the mark, 
but only the satisfaction felt on attaining it, and there 
is no paradox ; but insist that pleasure is verily what 
ye aim at, then to maintain that we are not to aim at 
what we are all the while really aiming at is surely 
something more than a paradox. 

Clearly too in that case, as Sidgwick somewhat 
naively observes, "if we started with no impulse 
\ except the desire of pleasure, it might seem difficult 
Ito execute the practical paradox of attaining pleasure 
by aiming at something else 2 ." It might indeed; but 
I think we may go further and say that with such a 
complete inversion of the order of nature the difficulty 

1 Methods of Ethics, 6th edn, p. 48. 

2 Op. cit. p. 137. 



The 'Hedonistic Paradox" 341 

would, in fact, prove insuperable. The anticipation 
of a state of feeling that would be the same, no 
matter how it was attained, could never give rise to 
definite acts at all. Thus a subject animated solely by 
the ' mere desire of pleasure ' would never get under 
weigh ; but such a being is quite inconceivable. For 
experience, as already said, could never begin from 
a state of absolute privation, nor with the representa- 
tion of something in the future while as yet there was 
nothing definite in the present. Yet Sidgwick was of 
opinion that " even supposing a man to begin with 
absolute indifference to everything but his own plea- 
sure, it does not follow that if he were convinced that 
the possession of other desires and impulses were 
necessary to the attainment of the greatest possible 
pleasure, he could not succeed in producing these." 
Unfortunately Sidgwick makes no attempt even to 
suggest hypothetically how such a being, who obviously 
could not be a man, would set about this task 1 . 

Sidgwick contents himself with saying : " But this 
supposition is never actually realised. Every man, 
when he commences the task of systematising his 
conduct... is conscious of a number of different im- 
pulses and tendencies within him, other than the mere 
desire of pleasure... : so that he has only to place 
himself under certain external influences, and these 
desires and impulses will begin to operate without any 
effort of will 2 ." To the biologist or the psychologist 

1 Such a being would closely resemble the blind will of Schopen- 
hauer or von Hartmann and doubtless would end by being a pessimist. 
Indeed we may say that it was the underlying hedonism of Schopen- 
hauer and von Hartmann that led to their pessimism. 

2 Op. cit. p. 137. 



342 The Problem of Evil and Optimism 

even this statement must sound like a parody of the 
real facts of life. A mere aggregate of organs does 
not make an organism, nor does a number of merely 
different functions or impulses make life. Again a 
living being does not first exist aloof from its environ- 
ment and then ' have to place itself under external 
influences' in order that its life may begin. When 
a man ' commences the task of systematising his con- 
duct on principle' he is already a definite individual, 
already organically related to a definite environment : 
in a word his life is already a ' system/ so that in 
advancing from the natural plane of behaviour to the 
rational he only develops further what is already there. 
There is meaning and system in his behaviour at both 
levels : can we then suppose that there is no sort of 
connexion or continuity between the two ? And if 
there is any connexion or continuity between them 
how can the psychological character of their ends be 
fundamentally distinct ? This is a point that it will 
repay us to consider a little more closely. 

Since the publication of Butler's famous sermons 
on Human Nature, if not before, our moralists have 
admitted what rightly understood is indisputable, viz., 
that on the lower plane of animal life, the various 
springs of action are severally ' extra-regarding or 
disinterested ' and in a sense, ' blind ' ; but that in 
proportion as a ' self-regarding and interested ' spring 
of action develops, controlling these — such as self-love 
so-called — a higher level of life is attained, one charac- 
terised by rational insight and unity of purpose. The 
implication is that whereas those various 'propensions' 
are, so to say, automatic and spontaneous, self-love is 



'Extra-regarding' and "Self-regarding" 343 

autonomous and deliberate : they suggest a sentient 
organism, this presupposes a controlling and self- 
conscious mind. But the terminology employed is 
apt to mislead. On the one side we have a system 
of extra-regarding, blind, and indifferent impulses ; on 
the other a single self-regarding, foreseeing, and in- 
terested person : on the one side, objective ends without 
a self; on the other, a self without any objective end. 
Now surely in all this there is too much antithesis, 
the contrasts are too extreme ; so that not only the 
advance from the one level to the other, which 
nowadays at any rate is conceded, becomes altogether 
inexplicable, but both as they stand are beset with 
contradictions. 

We may see this best by starting from the higher. 
The end of self-love is said to be happiness, a con- 
tinuous subjective state of pleasant feeling. But the 
self that we love is presumably the self that we know, 
and that certainly does not live by feeling alone. Nor 
is it absolutely identical with the self that loves, in 
such wise that — disregarding grammar — we might say 
I love I, or — concealing the breach of grammatical 
concord — John loves John. Here, as elsewhere, out 
of barren identities nothing can come. The self that 
I love, that is the self that I know, is my self holding 
intercourse, having reciprocal relations, with a com- 
munity of other selves and with an environment to an 
indefinite extent resolvable into selves. So essential 
are these relations of other selves to my self, of the 
objective to the subjective, that without them not only 
would the all-important possessive \ my ' disappear for 
lack of its correlatives, but the possessing I too would 



344 The Problem of Evil and Optimism 

become as meaningless as the centre of a circle that 
had no circumference. With no ' content ' to be 
conscious of, it could know nothing, feel nothing, and 
do nothing : such a bare I would thus be worth nothing. 
Consciousness or experience then is not purely sub- 
jective, is not simply a state. It implies also an 
objective factor, that is certain ; and it implies further 
the reciprocal interaction of subject and object, self 
and not-self. 

But till one's knowledge of others has advanced 
some way self-consciousness, the knowledge of one's 
self, cannot begin. Definite objective knowledge in 
turn arises only along with definite subjective interests, 
so that apart from such interests there would be no 
knowledge of self and so no interest in self, such as 
self-love or the desire of one's own happiness assumes. 
Briefly then, self-consciousness or knowledge of self 
presupposes consciousness or knowledge of objects, 
and this again presupposes interests in objects. 
We may call such interests extra-regarding not self- 
regarding, so far as they are distinct from the interest 
in self. But here two points are important. First, 
interest in self is secondary and presupposes these 
primary interests ; alone it would be empty and mean- 
ingless. Secondly, as interests of the self, without 
which there could be no interest in self, these primary 
interests cannot be called disinterested in the literal 
sense of unselfish : interests without a self would again 
be a manifest contradiction. They are then the 
interests of a self, though a self as yet without know- 
ledge of itself, and so without any reflex interest in 
itself, in other words, without any self-conscious interest 



Pleasure never itself the End 345 

in its interests. These primary interests or ends 
are objective, but not in the sense in which the end 
of a watch — to use Butler's illustration — is objec- 
tive ; they are not merely the ends of another, they 
are the ends of a conscious self. So then the end of 
the i-^y-conscious self in controlling and extending 
these objective ends must obviously be itself objective 
too. In fact a subjective end without an object and 
an objective end without a subject are both alike con- 
tradictory. The psychological character of all possible ■"" 
ends of conduct is then fundamentally the same, and 
so the advance from the lower or natural plane to the 
higher or the rational is conceivable. But, and this 
for us now is the main point, in neither is pleasure ever 
itself the end, but always simply the satisfaction conse- 
quent on the accomplishment of ends 1 . 

Nevertheless, the hedonist will reply, it is obvious 
that we must distinguish between means and ends ; 
and since the attainment of all objective ends would 
be worthless without happiness it is obvious too that 
this alone is intrinsically desirable, that this subjective 

1 At first blush it seems conceivable that at any rate a self- 
conscious being could adopt pleasure as his end, and the ideal 
voluptuary is supposed to be such a being. In him, as Mr Bradley 
has said, "the feeling of self-realisation is the end, which calls for 
reality, without respect for anything in which the self is to be 
realised, except as a means. It is not necessary to say," he continues, 
" that the abstract feeling of satisfaction, as an end, contradicts the 
very notion of an end and must fail to satisfy ; nor is it necessary to 
add that the voluptuary as the man who consistently pursues that 
end, is an impossible character" {Ethical Studies, p. 245). Such an 
abnormality certainly could not be called a rational being nor could 
a society of such hold itself together. History affords proof enough 
of that. 



346 The Problem of Evil and Optimism 

end is the only ultimate end, in relation to which the 
so-called objective ends are in reality only means. 
Let us examine the following important passage from 
Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics, in which this position is 
clearly stated. "It may be said that... we may take 
' conscious life ' in a wide sense, so as to include the 
objective relations of the conscious being... and that 
from this point of view we may regard ['Virtue, Truth, 
Beauty, Freedom '] as in some measure preferable 
alternatives to Pleasure or Happiness...." But Sidg- 
wick continues : " to me at least it seems clear after 
reflection that these objective relations of the conscious 
subject, when distinguished from the consciousness 
accompanying and resulting from them, are not ulti- 
mately and intrinsically desirable... that, when (to use 
Butler's phrase) we 'sit down in a cool hour* we can 
only justify to ourselves the importance that we attach 
to any of these objects by considering its conducive- 
ness, in one way or another, to the happiness of 
sentient beings 1 ." Now, first of all, is there not here 
a radical confusion — one to which we are all too prone 
— the confusion, I mean, between analytical distinction 
and actual separation ? To say that " we may take 
conscious life in a wide sense as including objective 
relations" implies that we may also take it in a narrow 
sense as excluding these. But the psychologist as- 
suredly has no such choice : he must take what he 
always finds. No reflexion will enable him to take 
the consciousness accompanying or resulting from 
objective relations apart from these relations them- 
selves ; for there is no consciousness, or as we had 
1 Methods of Ethics, 6th edn, pp. 400 f. 



'Objective ends" not simply means 347 

better say, no experience, unless these form an integral 
part of it. It is clear, from the context, I allow, that 
what Sidgwick here meant by consciousness was 
pleasure (or pain). But it is equally clear that feeling 
alone, a purely subjective state, though always an 
element in consciousness or experience, is never the 
whole of it. We cannot then talk of pleasure or 
happiness or, to speak generally, of pure feeling as 
in any measure an alternative to the cognitions or 
actions from which it is inseparable. And yet Sidg- 
wick not only admits this inseparability, but even urges 
that "if we finally decide that ultimate good includes 
many things distinct from Happiness 1 ," hedonism 
becomes ' entangled in a vicious circle.' But if the 
inseparability be admitted, how is that decision to be 
avoided ? 

Why then does he still argue as if pleasure by 
itself could be a subjective end and the only ultimate 
end ? Regardless of the fact already insisted upon, 
that a purely subjective end is a psychological contra- 
diction, Sidgwick's main contention, we shall be told, 
is not that pleasure is a ' thing ' we can experience 
apart from ' things ' which are pleasant, but that these 
other 'things' are only means to it. But this we 
remark in the second place is like saying, to use a 
trivial illustration of Mill's, that one of the blades of 
a pair of scissors is a means to enable the other blade 
to cut : it is to ignore that subject and object are both 
essential to all conscious life, desirable or undesirable. 
If one is a means then the other must be a means 
too, and as cutting is the end of a pair of scissors so 
1 Op. cit. 1st edn, p. 376. 



348 The Problem of Evil and Optimism 

happiness becomes the end for the sake of which subr 
ject and object alike are only means : the pure feeling of 
pleasure, though a state of one of them, is the ultimate 
ruison d'etre of both 1 . All that matters is the capacity 
for pleasure in the one and the fitness to produce it in 
the other. Maximum pleasure being the end of the 
world, it would seemingly be indifferent whether the 
number of conscious individuals were increased and 
their capacity pro tanto diminished, or vice versa : in 
any case the attainment of the end would be the 
solution of the quantitative problem : — The greatest 
possible sum of pleasure wanted : how is it to be got 2 ? 
When all the objective interests of life are emptied out 
of it as only means and not meaning, this is the one 
question that remains. 

1 But Sidgwick used a different illustration, which he doubtless 
thought more apposite. Green's contention that " pleasure as feeling 
in distinction from its conditions, which are not feelings, cannot be 
conceived" (Hume, vol. 11. p. 7) he said "is neither more nor less 
true than the statement that an angle cannot be conceived apart 
from its sides" (Mind, O.S., n. p. 36). He then proceeds to urge 
that this does not hinder us from comparing one angle with another 
without comparing their sides. But surely as regards the main 
contention this is irrelevant. The pursuit of an end may be aptly 
enough represented by the direction of a line, but without ends we 
have no lines and therefore no angles. Again, whereas directed 
lines enclose an angle of definite magnitude, this as purely quanti- 
tative can never determine definitely directed lines, two pairs of 
lines, though oppositely directed, having e.g. the same angle. How 
then can maximum angle, if it have any meaning, be the end ? 

2 Cf. Sidgwick, op. cit., 6th edn, p. 415: "The point up to 
which, on utilitarian principles, population ought to be encouraged 

to increase, is that at which the product formed by multiplying 

the number of persons living into the amount of average happiness 
reaches its maximum." 



The Hedonist and the Parasite 349 

But now we may regard life as a series of processes, &s* q^U 
and in these, as in all processes, the mere means either ' 
disappear and are left behind as the process advances ; 
or they become so far worthless when the process is 
complete and its end attained. Moreover there is no 
ultimate advantage in means as such, and in fact we 
always seek to shorten and simplify such intermediaries 
as much as we can. But that the objective interests 
of life are not means in this sense is conclusively shown 
in parasitism, where many of them are dispensed with, 
but where too degeneration invariably follows. The \s 
literal meaning of happy in our own language and of 
its equivalents in others — as, for example, evSaifxcov, 
felix, glucklich, heureux — more or less distinctly implies 
the favour of fortune but contains not a hint of success- 
ful striving. That the favourites of fortune often show 
the degeneracy of parasites is proverbial. Far fuller 
is the life of self-reliant effort for the worthiest ends, 
and far fuller too the blessedness and content that 
crown its achievements. The thoughtless may envy 
the easy life of the favourites of fortune, but this is not 
the life that wise men praise. A world in which 
unalloyed pleasure was meted out to every sentient 
being would then be very like a world of parasites and 
so far from being the best of worlds would, because of 
its inevitable vapidity, ennui and unprogressiveness, 
be almost the worst — a contradiction, of course, and 
yet, so far as we can see, a necessary consequence. 
But this only serves to show that such a world is not 
possible at all. 

We can now move on a stage. If this conclusion 
is sound, it follows that much at any rate that we call 



k 



350 The Problem of Evil and Optimism 

evil is only relatively such. The term evil in such 
cases is, in fact, ambiguous ; since what is in one sense 
an evil is in another sense a good. " The world (it has 
been said) is, what for an active being it must be, full 
of hindrances 1 ." Invincible obstacles that barred all 
progress would indeed be absolute evils, but not so 
the hindrances that can be overcome, for only in sur- 
mounting such is solid advance possible. As to these, 
it has been said again, a man may " bless God for the 
law of growth with all the fighting it imposes upon 
him," evil in this sense, " i.e. what it is man's duty 
to fight, being one of the major perfections of the 
Universe 2 ." Again, in another way this relativity of 
many so-called evils is apparent : in relation to the 
past, as marking progress, they are really good ; only 
in view of future progress which they may delay do 
they become evil. So far it is true to convert the 
French proverb and say Le bien est rennemi du mieux: 
not only true but truer, so surely as progress is better 
than stagnation. " If a man has not wants, he will 
make no efforts," says Professor Sorley, "and if he 
make no efforts his condition can never be bettered. 
Thus social reformers have often found that the classes 
they have tried to elevate did not feel the evil of their lot 
as their benefactors saw it ; and they have had to create 
the consciousness of wants before attempting to satisfy 
them 3 ." The new position we reach then is, that a world 
whose fundamental characteristic — now at any rate — is 

1 Vauvenargues, quoted by Eucken, Geistige Stromungen der 
Gegenwart, 4te Aus. p. 288. 

2 C. S. Peirce, Hibbert Journal, vn. p. 107. 

3 Ethics of Naturalism, 2nd edn, p. 250. 



Evolution and the Relativity of Evil 351 

evolution cannot at any given stage of its development 
have that perfection towards which it is still only 
moving, which it can only have by acquiring. It is^ 
childish and futile to ask if the world might not have 
been created perfect at once ; to question whether an 
evolving world is the best. We cannot form the 
dimmest idea of what experience in a ' ready-made ' 
world would mean, if experience, as I have ventured 
elsewhere to define it, is the process of becoming 
expert by experiment. So far as we can judge, a 
world perfect — in the sense of finished and complete 
at once — is a contradiction. - u 

But at any rate the question may be raised whether 
the sort of evolution that we observe in this world is 
ideally the best. Granted that in an evolving world 
there will be the imperfection or incompleteness that 
all becoming implies, need there be besides such 
positive defects as physical suffering, error and sin ? 
As we have first the blade, then the ear, then the full 
corn in the ear and can conceive each to be faultless,; 
can it be impossible to conceive the development of a] 
world in like manner ? And if that is not impossible, 
how can this world with its manifold physical, intel- 
lectual and moral defects be the best ? This objection 
we must now in the next place endeavour to meet. 

The term evolution we have found used in two 
senses ; in the strict sense, for the gradual unfolding 
of what is implicitly present from the first, and again 
in a looser sense for what is better called epigenesis or 
the continuous creation of what is essentially new. 
The initial possibilities would in the one case virtually 
include the actual course of the process throughout the 



352 The Problem of Evil and Optimism 

future, in the other they would only exclude indefinite 
abstract possibilities as not compossible, to use Leibniz's 
phrase, that is to say, as actually impossible. In both 
cases certain possibilities would give place to actualities 
as the evolution advanced ; but in the latter new pos- 
sibilities would continually arise, in the former they 
would not. In the one there would be from the first 
a unity and harmony which in the other were only 
eventually achieved. The one would be what William 
James called a block universe, the other what he called 
a multiverse, or better perhaps a uni-multiverse. In a 
word, the concept of the world in the former case is 
that of a dialectical development of one Supreme Idea, 
such as Hegel essayed to delineate. 

In the earlier part of these lectures I endeavoured 
to establish two points, first- that the transition from 
such a purely ideal process to the historical world is 
inconceivable, as Hegel in spite of himself made clear ; 
and secondly, that from the point of view of the Idea 
or Absolute, such transition would be superfluous 1 . I 
must content myself by assuming that these points are 
established ; as also a third, reached in the present 
part, viz. that setting out from where we are, from 
the standpoint of the Many, we have no ground for 
assuming a Creator who does everything but only a 
Creator whose creatures create in turn. The real 
world must be the joint result of God and man 
(including under this term other finite intelligences 
both higher and lower in the scale), unless we are to 
deny the reality of that in us which leads us to the idea 
of God at all. The evolution of such a world then 
1 Cf. Lectt. ii. vii. 



Evolution and Contingency 353 

plainly cannot be a case of evolution in the first sense. 
But if not, then where the Many have some initiative, 
— where development is epigenetic — contingency and 
conflict, fallibility and peccability seem inevitable; and 
these are at any rate relative evils, for they assuredly 
entail suffering. 

Even so, it will be asked again, can anyone pretend 
that he sees no unnecessary suffering in a world like 
this, where storms devastate and plagues strike ; where 
ignorance consigns the noblest to exile, to torture and 
to death ; where vice lapped in luxury grinds down the 
poor and from its very crimes argues that there is no 
God ? In attempting to deal with the serious difficulty 
here raised it will be best to consider physical and 
moral evil apart 1 . Now if — to begin with the former — 
we were challenged to show directly that certain definite 
physical ills — fever germs or 'malignant' tumours, say — 
have somehow their requisite place in the world's eco- 
nomy, we certainly should be most presumptuous and 
unwise to take up the gage. But we may at least 
contend that on the other hand we are equally incom- 
petent to show conclusively that any assigned physical 
cause of suffering is really superfluous. 

But then at once we find ourselves confronted with 
an old objection. The notion of any evil as unavoid- 
able, we shall be told, involves the contradiction of a 
non-omnipotent, or finite, God, and is, therefore, not 
theistic but atheistic. Omnipotence, I fear, is one of 
those question-begging epithets that everybody uses 

1 Intellectual evil, or error, may be practically regarded as belong- 
ing partly to the one partly to the other. 

w. 23 



354 The Problem of Evil and Optimism 

and nobody defines 1 . Thus it is not uncommonly taken 
to imply not merely the power to do whatever it is 
possible to do, but also the power arbitrarily to determine 
what shall be possible ; nay even that the impossible 
shall be possible ; in short that omnipotence absolutely 
excludes impossibility. Thus we find Schopenhauer 
saying: — "Even if Leibniz's demonstration, that among 
the possible worlds this one is the best, were correct : 
yet still it would not amount to a theodicy. For in 
truth the Creator is the author not merely of the world 
but of possibility too : he ought accordingly to have 
devised this in such a way as to admit of a better 
world 2 ." Metaphysic of this sort is not to be met by 
argument. It is sufficient to remark that at any rate 
so long as there is no difference between possible and 
impossible so long omnipotence can have no meaning : 
two and two may be four or it may be five. Within 
this mystical region, where ' naught is everything and 
everything is naught,' determinate being or thought 
or action there can be none. If there were an 
omnipotent God he must emerge thence to act at 
all and then could only do what is possible ; though 
what is possible would be determined, of course, by 
what he is and only so. To proclaim creation restricted 
by determinate possibilities to be an idea derogatory to 
the sovereign majesty of God is but blind adulation ; 

1 In a similar connexion it is interesting to find Mr Bradley 
saying : — " I shall be told that the Governor of the Universe is 
omnipotent. Perhaps ; but as I never could find out what that 
means, I can hardly be expected to admit it as true." Mind, O. S. 
vni. 259. 

2 Parerga und Paralipomena, 11. § 157. 



So-called 'Metaphysical Evil' 355 

for it really amounts to denying that God is himself a 
definite being at all, is either intellectually or morally 
consistent. All determination is negation, Spinoza has 
truly said : to find in this an evil, a so-called meta- 
physical or logical evil, only shows what ambiguity the 
term may involve. 

From such miscalled evils no world can be free. ^ t]f. 
To take a simple illustration. Our decimal system of 
numeration has the inconvenience that its radix 10 has 
only two factors, while 12, the radix of the duodecimal 
system, has twice as many ; and if we had had six 
fingers on each hand, we should doubtless have taken 
twelve as our radix and been so far, it is supposed, 
better off 1 . That in other respects we should not have 
been worse off is more than we know. Moreover the 
longer system still has defects — in fact, as many positive 
defects as the shorter 2 — whilst against its superiority in 
respect of divisibility may be set its greater complexity. 
But the point of our illustration is that no system of 
numeration is possible that shall be in all respects 
ideally perfect. Without being Pythagoreans and 
hailing number as ' omnipotent, the principle and 
guide of divine and human life,' we still cannot doubt, 
in these days when science calls itself measurement, 
that many of our so-called ' physical evils ' depend 
ultimately on such miscalled ' metaphysical evil 3 .' So 
far as they go at any rate there is no problem. 

1 Herbert Spencer regarded this \ evil ' as so serious that he left, 
I understand, the bulk of his property to be expended in combating 
the decimal system and advocating the duodecimal. 

2 Cf. Herbert Spencer's Autobiography, vol. i. p. 531. 

3 Cf. A. Ott, Le Probleme du Mai, 1888, pp. 153 f. 

23—2 



i 



356 The Problem of Evil and Optimism 

We come back then to the alleged superfluous 
physical evils. It is futile to attempt to imagine a 
world different in type from ours. This statement, we 
assume, cannot be gainsaid and from this we set out. 
Now the world, as we directly know it, consists as we 
have seen in a plurality of individuals, whom we may 
call plastic in so far as they are capable of experience. 
All of them, again, are intent on self-conservation or 
betterment. This, however, is not guaranteed to them 
altogether apart from their own efforts ; but it is to 
be achieved in large measure through these. Even if 
there be a God he certainly has not made the world 
what it is to be, but rather endowed it with talents to 
enable it to work out its own perfection in conjunction 
with himself. This working out is what we call ex- 
perience, and experience can never pre-suppose the 
knowledge or the skill that is only gained by means 
of it. Where several possibilities are open a creature 
acting on its own initiative can only find out the right 
one by way of trial and often of error. Such error 
we may say is an evil ; but we cannot straightway 
call it a superfluous, still less an absolute, evil, if it is 
an inevitable incident of experience as such, and if in 
general the experience is worth what it costs. 

Can we, however, say that in general experience is 
worth what it costs ? it will be urged. But can we say 
that it is not? we reply: we are not arraigning the con- 
stitution of the world and therefore it is for those who 
are to make their indictment good. W'hich way does 
the presumption lie ? This for us is the final question. 
At this point there is one consideration that may help 
us. The more all things eventually work together for 



Alleged superfluous evils 357 

good the greater our assurance that Goodness is at the 
root of all. The attainment of such complete and 
enduring harmony, however, may well entail an ex- 
haustive experience of possibilities as its indispensable 
condition. First thoughts are rarely the best, and the 
more haste we make often the worse we speed. The 
fittest to survive, we are told, appear only as the final 
outcome of innumerable continuous variations : Natura 
nonfacit saltus. Herein lies the significance for us of 
Leibniz's contention that whereas " a machine made by 
the skill of man is not a machine in each of its parts.... 
the machines of nature, our living bodies, are still 
machines in their smallest parts." Such thoroughness 
must imply slowness and much seemingly useless 
trouble if the process is to be that of experience and 
epigenesis. Like impatient children, we can hardly 
restrain the wish "to see the Supreme Good active in 
some other way than this which it has itself chosen,... 
or by some shorter path than the roundabout one " of 
creation through creatures, which it has itself entered 
upon 1 . 

But still there are those other physical evils, such 
as storms, droughts, earthquakes and the like, that can 
hardly be regarded as the direct consequence of in- 
cipient and imperfect experience. Can it be said that 
these are not absolute nor even superfluous evils ? In 
attempting to deal with them we must recall another 
characteristic of the world's evolution. At any stage 
in this process the world, we have seen, may be 
described as being in part comparatively fixed, in part 
still fluent, in part comparatively stable, in part still 
1 Cf. Lotze, Microcosmus, Eng. trans, n. p. 727. 



358 The Problem of Evil and Optimism 

developing : at once natura naturata and natura 
naturans. That the life and progress of society, all its 
spontaneity, initiative and individuality, would be in- 
effective without its conservative elements of stability — 
habit, custom, law and the like — is obvious. Yet these 
are not an unmixed good. Habit is ability indeed, but 
its blindness and fatal facility are proverbial. Custom, 
which according to Hume is the great guide of human 
life, Bagehot has called ' the most terrible tyranny ever 
known among men,' and yet, as again another has 
said, 

We draw 
Our right from custom : custom is a law 
As high as heaven, as wide as sea or land. 

Summum jus, summa injuria is the maxim of equity ; 
and yet injury means injustice. 

The dubious character thus attaching to the con- 
servative factors of the social world holds also of the 
more fundamental routine of what we often speak of 
apart as the physical world. Here, too, in what are 
called the conservations of mass and energy we have 
principles that are at once the indispensable conditions 
of stable construction, and yet tending always to 
destruction in so far as they count nothing stable 
that they can further level down — just as friction, 
again, renders locomotion possible and yet steadily 
retards it. All this perhaps may help to account for 
the world-wide association of matter with evil. How 
far down within this seemingly fixed mechanism the 
fluent processes of life extend we do not know ; if 
there are such processes their tempo, so to say, is so 



The World's Conservative Factors 359 

different from ours that their significance escapes us. 
But in any case in their comparative fixity, not in their 
possible secular transformation, lie all their present 
advantages and disadvantages for us. That the 
advantages so far exceed the disadvantages is evident 
from the advances that the world has made, is making, 
and bids fair long to continue to make. Can we have 
the one without the other? If not, then the disad- 
vantages are neither absolute evils nor in general 
superfluous evils : metaphysical or logical evils they 
may be called. But we may ask again if that means 
anything more beyond what all individuation seems 
necessarily to imply ? 

What we might perhaps call the temporary 
solidarity of physical good and evil is brought home 
to us in two ways : first, by the rash attempts that 
have been frequently made to show how things might 
have been better ; and, secondly, by the ignorant 
prayers for favourable wind and weather or the like, 
that religion is supposed to countenance. The foolish- 
ness of the latter is obvious, inasmuch as the wind that 
was ' good ' for the ship homeward bound would be 
bad for that bound outwards, and the weather that 
hastened the ripening of one farmer's corn might dry 
up the pasture of another. Such really impious peti- 
tions are as senseless as the belief in magic or the 
demand for perpetual miracles. If they were granted 
they would put an end to all order and render rational 
conduct impossible. As to the former — there are 
diseases indeed that seem to be unmixed evils, to 
be neither the collateral consequences of what once 
was good nor the indispensable conditions of any good 



360 The Problem of Evil and Optimism 

to come 1 . Leaving such cases aside it would be hard 
to find a single instance in which suggestions for the 
better remoulding of the physical world have not been 
shown by men wiser than their authors to be only 
specifications for a fool's paradise. 

But there is yet another difficulty connected with 
physical evil that is unquestionably serious, since it 
weighs heavily on many earnest minds. The course of 
evolution so far has conquered some evils and ame- 
liorated others, they allow ; but will this progress 
continue unabated or will it not one day cease and 
eviT in its turn gain the ascendency ? " The theory 
of evolution," Huxley, for example, has said, " encour- 
ages no millennial anticipations. If, for millions of 
years, our globe has taken the upward road, yet, some 
time the summit will be reached and the downward 
route will be commenced. The most daring imagina- 
tion will hardly venture upon the suggestion that the 
power and intelligence of man can ever arrest the 
procession of the great year 2 ." This is the language 
of naturalism pure and simple, but if naturalism be 
accepted as the ultimate truth of things, it is useless to 
talk of a realm of ends at all : if the life of man and all 
that it implies are but episodes in what Spencer called 
the integration of matter and the dissipation of motion, 
then indeed there is no more to be said. But if, as we/ 
have seen reason for doing, we take a wider and deeper 
view of evolution and regard this so-called realm of 
nature as having itself all its reality and meaning 

1 But often they are the fruits of evil doing and often their 
removal is within our power and is more than a negative gain. 

2 Evolution and Ethics, Collected Essays, ix. p. 85. 



Progress without Decline 361 

within the one world of living agents, why should 
we suppose the supreme end of this to be simply 
its own undoing, or take the meaning of the part to 
be the stultification of the whole ? Only if nature is 
independent of spirit, and atheism, too, an established 
certainty, can we, as Huxley does, apply to evolution 
as a whole the words of Tennyson's Ulysses : — 

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down, 
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles. 

If Spirit is supreme, its end must be sure of realisation 
and the procession of its great year know no decline. 
.Nor, happily, does the doctrine of the dissipation of 
energy, rightly understood, in any way justify the 
gloomy forebodings to which its misunderstanding has 
given rise. 

But, while we have allowed that theism is essential 
before we can be confident that the world will not fail 
of the end that seems the only clue to its meaning, we 
have also had to allow that we have no theoretical 
proof of theism. On the other hand our discussion of 
the problem of evil has so far, we claim, brought to 
light nothing that disproves theism and removed much 
that at the outset appeared to make against it. We 
have still, however, to consider what is unquestionably 
the chief count in the whole indictment with which a 
theodicy has to deal — the fact of moral evil. 



LECTURE XVII. 

MORAL EVIL AND MORAL ORDER. 

" That must needs have been glorious the decays of 
which are so admirable. He that is comely when old 
and decrepit surely was very beautiful when he was 
young. An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, 
and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise." These 
famous words of a seventeenth century orator and 
divine fairly represent the standpoint from which even 
to-day the question of moral evil is frequently discussed. 
That our world in its present state should be a hopeless 
ruin, which nothing short of the intervention of infinite 
wisdom and goodness could restore, is, it is held, con- 
ceivable ; but that this world should be what it is as 
the result of a development on the whole steady and 
continuous is thought to be quite inconceivable. In 
short, God, it is said, created man in his own image 
and "he himself tempteth no man": to account for 
moral evil then we must, it is supposed, assume that 
man by his own wilful act has fallen from his high 
estate. 

But why should all have sinned and come short 
of the glory of God ? To answer this question the 
doctrine of original sin is added as a corollary to the 
doctrine of the fall. The whole human race, past, 



Moral Evil in the light of Evolution 363 

present, and future, is regarded as involved in one 
common perdition that is somehow the moral con- 
sequence of the action of the first and — as we must 
believe — the least experienced of its members. Is it 
not possible to account for the prevalence of moral evil 
in a way less shocking to ordinary morality than this ? 
But first we may ask, does this account for it ? With- 
out still further supplement we find itjdoegjiot. That a 
man wiser than the wisest should heed the voice of 
sense or sophistry is only credible if he is already 
infected with 'original sin.' Accordingly either a 
timeless or a prenatal fall has to be assumed ; and, 
finally, the existence of a personal principle of evil in 
the shape of the devil with his maxim, Evil, be thou 
my good. In short, such speculations — all alike, be it 
noted, in ignoring the Concept of evolution — fail al- 
together to explain the existence of moral evil, to say 
nothing of their inherent improbability : they leave it, 
as Kant had the candour to admit, an insoluble 
mystery. We have now then to inquire whether, when 
we do not ignore evolution, the problem of moral evil 
still remains equally insoluble. 

First of all, if we are to stand by evolution, we 
shall have to invert Robert South's rhetoric, and rank 
primeval man a long way behind Aristotle, and his 
primitive resources a long way behind even the 
rudiments of Athenian civilisation. Hegel's saying, 
that Paradise without the so-called fall was — what 
indeed the word means — just ein Park filr Thiere, a 
park for beasts, furnishes a better text for the evolu- 
tionist. For the human race, like the human individual, 
in the course of its development has certainly passed 



364 Moral Evil and Moral Order 

through the brute stage; and the transition from the 
ignorant ' innocence ' of this level of life to ' the know- 
ledge of good and evil ' is surely as such a rise rather 
than a fall. Let us then endeavour to trace the course 
of this development and see if it is not really an 
advance. 
I Moral evil is doubtless essentially selfishness. Yet 

selfishness has its roots in that instinct of self-preserva- 
tion, which is called the first law of nature and which 
moralists of all schools recognise as a rational principle 
of action that arises as soon as self-consciousness is 
attained. When and how does what is thus, so to say, 
rooted in right nevertheless become wrong? To love 
himself a man must know himself, but he can know 
himself only through knowing other selves: neither 
I self-love nor selfishness then is possible below the 
social level, as we have already had to remark more 
than once. With society moral order begins and in 
society moral evil may arise. Further, as society is 
based entirely on the mutual dependence and the 
mutual services of the- persons who compose it, the 
cardinal principle of moral order is justice ; and all 
immorality, whatever else it may be, is injustice. The 
very words themselves bear witness to this, in so far as 
mores or customs are the origin of law. But already 
in the gregarious habits of many of the higher animals 
and in the family life of others we find that the uncon- 
scious germs of the altruism on which society rests are 
present along with the instinctive egoism all life im- 
plies. Now at the outset it is obvious that the age of 
innocence is characterized by acts which have all the 
objective qualities of moral evil, though no guilt can be 



Innocence and Wrong-doing 365 

imputed to the agents. When the moth flies into the 
candle-flame we might regard it as sacrificing its own 
future welfare for the sake of momentary gratifica- 
tion — behaviour which we should call imprudence, or 
injustice to self 1 , if the moth were a reasonable person. 
The habits of the cuckoo in ejecting its foster-brothers 
from the nest and maltreating its foster-parents strike 
us as revolting instances of injustice and ingratitude; 
and would indeed be such, if only the cuckoo knew 
better. To repeat: it seems, we say, in the first place 
indisputable that in the evolution of conduct acts 
objectively wrong are constantly committed before the 
individual has any consciousness of wrong-doing. How 
then, we have to ask in the next place, does this con- \S 
sciousness of wrong-doing arise — or, more generally, 
under what circumstances does conscience appear ? 

Before we can attempt to answer this question we 
ought, it may be thought, to make clear in what sense we ^^ 

understand such a very complex and ambiguous term as 
conscience. But happily we are not concerned with all 
that conscience ever means but only with what it means 
always. For one thing, it always means approval or 
disapproval : conscience always involves a judgment 
that ' accuses or else excuses.' Such judgment again is 
always passed by the person himself upon his own 
conduct and motives. It thus implies self-conscious- 
ness : without self-consciousness there is no conscience 2 . 

1 Cf. Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, 6th edn, p. 381. 

2 Hence the close relationship between the two terms, conscience 
and consciousness in its original sense of self-consciousness — as we 
find it say in Locke or Reid — a relationship so close that in French 
the one word conscience is still used for both. 



rh 



366 Moral Evil and Moral Order 

Finally conscience always implies a standard : only so 
is it complete 1 . Our question then amounts to this : 
How does the individual come by his standard? 

A general answer is at once evident : he acquires 
the knowledge of his standard as he acquires the 
knowledge of himself — through social, intercourse 2 . 
But we must try to be more specific. In the first 
place then we may note that this advance from the 
level of mere consciousness to that of self-conscious- 
ness is very gradual, so that with the child and the 
savage the merely conscious or objective attitude 
decidedly preponderates. Accordingly other selves, as 
belonging to the objective world, are observed con- 
tinually and directly, but the experiencing self only 
occasionally and reflectively — more or less retrospec- 
tively — in the exceptional circumstances that evoke 
the subjective attitude. Two consequences follow 
from all this : first, the one that we have just noted 
— viz. that acts which are objectively selfish will be 
constantly committed though there is as yet no con- 
sciousness of their selfishness ; secondly, that this 
objective selfishness will nevertheless be frequently 
apparent to others, and will be disapproved. The 
story of David and Nathan may serve as an illustration, 
if we compare the swiftness of David's condemnation 
of another's cupidity with his tardiness to realise his 

1 It is worth remarking that Locke in the first three editions of 
his Essay defined conscience as " nothing else but our own opinion 
of our own actions." In later editions he changed this to "our own 
opinion or judgment of the moral rectitude or pravity of our own 
actions " — thus explicitly recognising the possession of a standard as 
essential. 

2 Cf. above, Lect. vi. pp. 122 rT. 



The rise of Conscience 367 

own. To be sure we cannot exonerate David, im- 
pulsive though he was, as we exonerate a child or a 
savage. But that after all only lends point to the 
instance ; for if, where conscience is developed, in the 
heat of passion such things are still possible, can we 
do else than suppose that they are indefinitely more 
possible where conscience has yet to be developed, 
and also that they are indefinitely more innocent? So 
then, while still unconscious of our own wrong-doing, 
we become judges of the wrong-doing of others ; and 
these two positions we continually interchange till at 
length we find both combined in our own person. 
Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments was 
the first modern writer 1 to deal with our question at all 
satisfactorily, and the answer may be recapitulated in 
his words : — " Our first moral criticisms are exercised 
upon the characters and conduct of other people.... 
But we soon learn, that other people are equally frank 
with regard to our own. We become anxious to 
know how far we deserve their censure or applause.... 
We begin, upon this account, to examine our own 
passions and conduct, and to consider how these must 
appear to them by considering how they would appear 
to us if in their situation.... It is evident that in all 
such cases, I divide myself, as it were, into two persons : 
and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different 
character from that other I, the person whose character 
is examined into and judged of 2 ." But we may sum 

1 He seems to have been anticipated by Polybius. Cf. Dugald 
Stewart's Introduction in his edition of Adam Smith's Theory, 
p. xxxi. 

2 Op. cit. Part in. ch. i. pp. 163 f. 






368 Moral Evil and Moral Order 

up our answer still more succinctly in the language of 
a later writer, by saying that a man's conscience finds 
its first moral standard in * the_voice of his tribal self 1 .' 
Though this first standard is woefully defective, 
still it carries within it the knowledge of moral good 
and evil : the knowledge of previously unknown evil 
that was already there but is now condemned, though 
it be not straightway abandoned ; the knowledge of 
previously unknown good that is henceforth approved, 
though it be not always pursued. The transition to 
this stage from the stage of innocence we find has been 
gradual ; and pari passu inevitable evil — as such non- 
moral — has become avoidable evil, evil that is freely 
and consciously chosen — and as such bad. Is this an 
advance? we ask. If the evil, now known, were never 
forsaken and the good, now seen to be possible, never 
pursued : if the words of Ovid, Video meliora proboque, 
deteriora sequor, were universally true of all human 
deeds, there certainly would be no advance. But that 
is not what we find. At any rate what we do not find, 
it will be said, is the knowledge of evil without the 
commission of it, or the knowledge of good without its 
omission ; and it is this fact after all that is the 
gravamen of the whole problem. It is, no doubt, and 
we must presently turn to it. Meanwhile we have 
gained something if we have found in the theory of 
evolution the means of divesting the problem of two of 
the mysteries that have hitherto enshrouded it — the 
doctrine of a fall from a state of moral perfection and 
the doctrine of original sin. And we may hail it as a 

1 W. K. Clifford, Lectures and Essays, 2nd edn, pp. 290 — 293. 



\s 



The dogma of 'the FalT 369 

hopeful sign of the times that there are now theologians 
who have the courage to admit this 1 . 

But this appeal to evolution, it may be replied, 
after all only throws the difficulty one step further back. 
For if the germs of moral evil are present from the 
first, what is this but to allow of a sort of original sin 
scarcely less repugnant to our moral ideas than the 
questionable theological dogma that has been dis- 
credited? On the contrary the difference is surely 
profound. Original sin is described in the West- 
minster Confession as an "original corruption, whereby 
we are utterly indisposed... to all good and wholly 
inclined to all evil." The theory of evolution furnishes 
no warrant for such innate depravity of disposition. To 
regard our primary and spontaneous impulses as if they 
were already the germs of moral evil is to ignore the 

1 I will quote one passage in evidence and I quote it the more 
readily because its author is a friend and former pupil of my own : — 
11 There is thus every reason to believe that the awakening of man's 
moral sense or sentiment, his discovery of a law by which he came to 
know sin, was an advance accomplished by a long series of stages. 
Consequently the origin of sin, like other so-called origins, was also a 
gradual process rather than an abrupt and inexplicable plunge. The 
appearance of sin, from this point of view, would not consist in the 
performance of a deed such as man had never done before, and of 
whose wickedness, should he commit it, he was previously aware ; it 
would rather be the continuance in certain practices, or the satisfying 
of natural impulses, after that they were first discovered to be contrary 
to a recognised sanction of rank as low as that of tribal custom. The 
sinfulness of sin would gradually increase from a zero ; and the first 
sin, if the words have any meaning, instead of being the most heinous 
and the most momentous in the race's history, would rather be the 
least significant of all." F. R. Tennant, The Origin and Propagation 
of Sin : Hulsean Lectures, 1902, p. 91. 

w. 24 



37° Moral Evil and Moral Order 

true meaning of ' moral ' altogether 1 . Those impulses 
constitute the basis alike for moral order and for moral 
evil, but they are actually the one as little as the 
other. 

To identify moral evil and sin defined as enmity to 
God is a still graver mistake, and one which has 
greatly aggravated the difficulty of reconciling the 
existence of moral evil with theism. But neither 
psychology nor the moral and religious development of 
humanity, so far as we can trace it, will support such a 
doctrine. According to that doctrine all particular evil 
thoughts or deeds are but indicia of the breach of the 
first and great commandment of love to God. But love, 
like morality, we have found to be possible only when 
the stage of social intercourse and self-consciousness is 
attained. Prior to that, man cannot be said consciously 
to love even himself ; and till he has learned to love his 
" brother, whom he hath seen, how can he love God, 
whom he hath not seen ? " In recent years, since the 
importance of the historical method has been recognised, 
an enormous mass of facts concerning primitive religion 
and morality has been collected, but we are still sadly 
lacking in insight into their true meaning and con- 
nexion. In the earlier phases of its development 
religion doubtless powerfully reinforced the sanctions 
of the existing morality, but on the other hand probably 
morality at first did more to elevate religion than 
religion did to elevate morality. Under the influence 
of the higher religions however morality has unquestion- 
ably gained in what we may call inwardness as well as 

1 Cf. Tennant, op. cit. on " The ambiguous usage of the term 
' Sin ' and its derivatives," pp. 160 ff. 



The dogma of ' Original Sin ' 37 1 

in authority 1 . Hence the deep sense of sin that is 
characteristic of the awakened Christian conscience. 
Sin^ i n fac t, as Mr Hobhouse has well said, ''borrows 
something of the infinitude of the Being against whom 
it offends and [so] puts a measureless gulf between 
Him and the sinner." Consciousness of sin cannot \- 
then be the first stage of moral evil. On the contrary 
just as morality is an advance upon the animal level, 
which as such cannot be called immoral, so this sense 
of sin is^an advance upon the level of mere immorality, 
which as such cannot be described as one of enmity or 
estrangement between man and God. On the merely k 
moral level self-righteousness is possible, on the higher 
religious level it is not : hence " there is joy in heaven 
over one sinner that repenteth more than over ninety 
and nine righteous persons that need no repentance." 
y For such repentance is a new birth into a higher life ; 
but it is not deliverance from innate depravity : it is 
truly an advance on all that existed before, not a 
restoration of pristine innocence. 

Here however let us return to the main question 
just now mentioned. Granted, it is urged, that the 
attainment of a knowledge of good and evil is an 
advance, why need all further advance be interrupted 
by lapses? The lapses in question consist in what we 
ordinarily call yielding to temptation, as in the fall our 
first parents are said to have yielded. v The average 
child or man does not yield to every temptation, but 
only to some, while others are resisted. We can, it 
is thought, imagine an individual never exposed to 
temptations too strong to be overcome, and yet liable 
1 Cf. Matt. v. 27, 33, 43 ; vi. i, 2, 16. 

24 — 2 



372 Moral Evil and Moral Order 

to temptations of ever increasing strength as his own> 
moral strength increased ; just as a pine may tower 
a hundred feet above the plain with its leading bud 
still intact, if the strains it has to bear, though growing 
— and growing, because of its growth — never reach 
the breaking point. Why is the world such that moral 
characters don't grow in this manner ? A wise parent, 
it is said, can do much to protect his child from 
excessive temptation ; and God, if he would, could 
surely do much more, could in fact do all that is needed. 
But that parents in this respect can be over-wise is 
proverbial : for ' fugitive and cloistered virtue ' proves 
but a feeble and imperfect thing compared with the 
virtue that ' sallies forth and sees her adversary/ 
Young Washington turned out a better man through 
being entrusted with that famous hatchet than he 
would have done if kept out of the mischief into which 
it led him. The leading bud of the forest-giant is in 
the end no greater than it was when the tree started as 
a sapling, nor is moral strength to be increased by 
cockering, though objectively good habits may grow 
apace as long as the conditions are favourable. In 
short, reflexion, I believe, will convince us that a 
world in which the possibility of wrong-doing was 
prevented by the exclusion of all temptations that were 
really such, could neither be nor become a moral world 
at all. 

" Call it a non-moral world then, if you choose," 
some will say; "at all events it would be a better 
world than this which presumably you call moral." So 
Huxley : " I protest," he said, " that if some great 
Power would agree to make me think always what is 






it is 



A World in 'leading strings' 373 

true and do what is right on condition of being turned 
into a sort of clock... I should instantly close with the 
bargain. The only freedom I care about is the freedom 
to do right ; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to 
part with on the cheapest terms to any one who will 
take it of me 1 ." But freedom and clockwork, freedom 
and yet no choice ; clockwork and experience, absolute 
routine and yet continuous progress in self-knowledge 
and self-control, are not these flagrant contradictions ? 
That imaginary non-moral world would indeed be a 
perfect world of its kind ; but it would be only a world 
of automata between which complete harmony had 
been pre-established. This actual world of ours can 
lay no claim to such perfection ; it has still to work out 
its own salvation. But it is certainly a moral world, 
for it acknowledges the authority of conscience even 
when it disobeys : conscience is ever a power in it 
working for the righteousness, in which alone the world 
finds its own meaning and its supreme ideal. A world 
entirely in leading strings may realise an ideal, but it 
can have no ideal that is truly its own, no moral ideal. 
Which now is the better world ? In asking this 
question we are reminded of Lessing's fine saying, 
though it relates only to the first of the two goods 
that Huxley wanted ready-made. " Did the Al- 
mighty," said Lessing, " holding in his right hand 
Truth, and in his left Search for Truth, deign to offer 
me the one I might prefer ; — in all humility but with- 
out hesitation, I should request — Search for Truth*." 

1 Methods and Results, Collected Essays, i. p. 192. 

2 Quoted among a number of similar passages by Hamilton 
Metaphysics, 1. p. 13. 



374 Moral Evil and Moral Order 

As to moral good however no such alternative seems 
possible. " Nothing takes place morally," said Rothe, 
^ " except what takes place tkrotigk ones own self- 
determination : this it is that converts it from a mere 
taking place into an action 1 ." This is the main fact, — 
' main miracle ' if you will — " this power T on thine own 
act and on the world " which evolution and morality 
alike imply. A world of so-called creatures devoid of 
all initiative would not be an evolving world as we 
understand evolution. Such a world might embody 
its Creators will perhaps, if we could say that is willed 
which we need only conceive as thought ; but even if it 
could be held to express his will it still could never 
either know it or do it. The possibility of moral evil, 
in a word, is implied in any moral order that is evolved 
at all : to make this impossible is to make that im- 
possible too. Of course to one who should prefer to be 
an immaculate puppet rather than a man with all his 
shortcomings but also with all his capabilities, there is 
no more to be said. But is sucfr an irrational person 
conceivable? 2 

The sort of ideal world that we have just discussed 
would cease to be non-moral if regarded, not as the 
result of a pre-established harmony, but as the achieve- 
ment of virtuous struggle crowned eventually with 
victory. So regarded we may call it the upper limit of 
moral evolution, the world in the era beyond good and 
evil, when evil is no more. At the other extreme we 

1 Quoted by Martineau, A Study of Religion, 2nd edn, 11. p. 103. 
Martineau's whole section on Moral Evil is admirable. 

2 I am well aware that Huxley of all men was not really one of 
this sort. 



The two Limits of Moral Evolution 375 

can imagine a limit at and below which moral evil is 
impossible, because moral good is impossible ; where 
the impulses of sense are so exclusive and so strong 
that prudence and virtue are out of the question. It is 
useless here to talk of temptation : this then we may 
call the lowe * limit of moral evolution. Between these 
two extremes lies our world, where moral evil, at once 
possible and avoidable, is yet continuously present : is 
it a hopeless venture to believe in God where such 
a state of things obtains ? A world in which it could 
not obtain, we have argued, would assuredly not be 
better, for such a world would not be moral at all. On 
the other hand a world in which it did not, though it 
still might, obtain, would, we must admit, certainly be 
a better world. But, for all that, the actual existence 
of moral evil in our world is only incompatible with 
a theocracy, if God is the author of this evil ; if, in 
other words, God is the sole free agent and his so- 
called creatures only so many impotent vessels of 
honour or dishonour. Then indeed God and the 
world would be bad together, but God only would 
be morally evil. And that surely is a supposition as 
absurd as it is monstrous. Before the presence of evil 
in the world can be cited as evidence that God is not 
present in it, it must be shewn that the evil is such as 
not merely to retard but absolutely to prevent the 
onward progress of moral order and render the attain- 
ment of the upper limit of moral evolution for ever 
impossible. 

Again we ask — Which way does the presumption 
lie? We are wont to say that a struggle between good 
and evil is now constantly going on, and then our 



'- 



376 Moral Evil and Moral Order 

question takes the form : — Which side, so far as we 
can judge, bids fair to win? But in fact the question 
in this form is not truly put. There is no such dualism 
of good and evil : they are not two coordinate powers ; 
in a word, there is no principle of evil 1 . There is a 
moral order, but evil is only disorder. This is the 
grain of truth in the contention so persistently main- 
tained, that evil is essentially negative. However 
woefully men mistake what is their real good, it is this 
none the less that each one constantly strives for : evil 
as evil js^ no man's aim. The devil's aim it is indeed 
said to be, but we are none of us pledged to believe in 
the devil. The struggle with evil then is not a struggle 
for supremacy like the battle of the gods and the Titans; 
it is an advance against hindrances, which exist only as 
hindrances, not as beings having ends of their own 
as Manichaeism supposed. The moment the true 
character of any form of evil is apparent that moment 
the struggle to overcome it begins : hence the world- 
wide association between evil and darkness. 

So far then there is truth again in the ancient Socratic 
paradox that virtue is knowledge and vice involuntary. 
We cannot, of course 2 , identify virtue and truth, vice and 
error : conduct is more than cognition, though, in pro- 
portion as it is intelligent, it always implies cognition. 
In impulsive action, we act first and know after ; but 
sooner or later experience brings wisdom : otherwise in 
fact the plane of deliberative action would never have 
been attained. On this level too, with its ' practical 

1 Cf. Lect. vi. pp. 131 ff. 

2 As Aristotle in his criticism of Socrates long ago pointed out. 
Cf. Eth. vi. 13; vii. 5. Also Mackenzie, Manual of Ethics, vm. 7. 



No Principle of Evil 377 

syllogism,' there may be genuine error — either as 
regards the major premise, the principle, or as regards 
the minor, the particular 'case,' but error of this sort 
too is corrigible and tends with growing experience to 
disappear. There may however be the self-sophistica- 
tion and casuistry which have made the ' wiles of the 
devil' proverbial, and to which the manifold euphemisms 
for every form of vice bear striking testimony. But 
they bear striking testimony also to the fact that evil 
can only flourish disguised sub specie boni, which doubt- 
less was part at least of what Socrates meant and led 
him, as it has led so many since, strenuously to advocate 
moral education. When then we compare the unity 
and solidarity of the good with the motley, many- 
headed shapes of evil ever at cross-purposes with each 
other, the conservation common to all forms of good 
and to no forms of evil ; when too we consider the close 
connexion between the good and the true, on the one 
hand, between error and evil on the other — have we not 
ground for believing in the eventual triumph of the 
good, have we not ground for maintaining that such 
moral evil as we find in the world, terrible though 
it is, is after all not such as to justify the atheistic 
position ? 

But there is still an old difficulty to consider. The 
moral evil in the world, it is said, is not confined to 
human misdeeds, innumerable and often heinous though 
they be : over and above them there is the want of 
justice in what are supposed to be God's ways with 
men. " All things come alike to all : there is one 
event to the righteous and to the wicked... : this is an 
evil in all things that are done under the sun." Well, 






378 Moral Evil and Moral Order 

if there is a God at all his ways are certainly not our 
ways. The writer of Ecclesiastes seems to rate them 
morally below our ways, the writer of Isaiah as much 
above them as the heavens are higher than the earth. 
What is the real difference ? Earthly monarchs have 
been known directly to interfere in the affairs of their 
subjects in order to exalt the worst and humble the 
best, but can we possibly regard the prosperity of the 
wicked and the suffering of the righteous as due to 
divine intervention in this way ? Ah immoral govern- 
ment of the world would indeed leave us no choice 
but atheism, and would so put an end to theodicies 
altogether. 

But untrained minds none the less picture to them- 
selves God's relation to the world as simply analogous 
to that of a sovereign to his subjects. And accord- 
ingly they find the solution of the difficulty raised, not 
' in atheism, but in the view expounded by Job's com- 
forters. In spite of appearances to the contrary, that is 
to say, there is, they maintain, strict moral government 
and the Judge of all the earth does right. Seeming 
misfortune is really punishment. So men thought when 
the tower of Siloam fell, and so the wide world through 
many think still. When then one man wilfully injures 
others he is the unwitting instrument of divine jjustice; 
and though society in punishing his crime performs 
a like office for him, what is to be said if, yielding to 
compassion, it proceeds to succour his victims ? De- 
liberate attempts to frustrate the ends of justice would 
surely themselves call for punishment. Again on this 
view might not the man in pursuit of worthy ends 
rely on the words of the Psalmist, which the tempter 



y 



, 



Moral Government in the World 379 

misquoted, and be confident, if he were indeed truly 
doing right, that no evil could befall him 1 ? In short, 
as Professor Royce, who has dealt excellently with this 
difficulty, sums it up, "the result is here indeed a moral 
fatalism, of an unexpected, but none the less inevitable 
sort 2 ." Its logical outcome rigorously pursued would 
be to render moral evil impossible and moral good 
inevitable — and that, we have already seen, is contra- 
dictory. We may conclude then that the contingency 
in the world, of which physical evil is a part, cannot be 
construed into a sign of moral imperfection in its con- 
stitution : such contingency is inseparable from any 
creation that is evolutionary in such wise as to leave 1 
free agents more or less initiative. 

At this point it might be objected : But if God 
does not interfere either to reward or to punish, then 
the only moral government there is in the world is the 
work of his creatures : ' their initiative ' is the whole, 
and the imperfection we find is no longer surprising. 
But what sort of God is one that only conserves the 
world on its physical side, — maketh his sun to rise on 
the evil and the good and sendeth rain on the just and 
the unjust — but leaves it morally to itself, to sink or 
swim as it may ? No moral government is better 
certainly than an immoral government, but is it the 
best possible ? But this objection is still coloured by 
the same crude anthropomorphism as the foregoing. 
Just as creation used to be conceived as accomplished 
only in the piecemeal fashion of a human artificer, 

1 Cf. Matt. iv. 6; Ps. xci. 

2 The World and the Individual, n. p. 404 : cf. the whole section, 
PP- 399—405- 



380 Moral Evil and Moral Order 

completing now this now that, so it was assumed that 
divine government must take the form of special inter- 
ferences, as in plagues and thunderbolts, sudden death 
and other so-called 'judgments.' Special providences 
like special creations, however, belong to a creed out- 
worn ; though the ideas of creation and providence may 
be valid still. But from the standpoint of pluralism 
they will be conceived as one continuous process of 
evolution, not as two distinct series of acts, one of 
which is an interference with the other 1 . 

Events that once impressed the untutored savage 
\/ as^ supernatural are now recognised as belonging to 
naturejs routine ; yet such events were doubtless im- 
portant factors in the early evolution of religion. Has 
this glimmer of the Divine beyond nature characteristic 
of primitive superstition utterly died out, or has it 
grown clearer with advancing knowledge ? Is the 
evidence for theism greater or less ? Less, unques- 
tionably — in fact none at all — if we seek only for 
miraculous signs, and maintain that apart from such 
special interpositions the whole cosmic order is non- 
moral. Then indeed, unless we are prepared to cast 
science to the winds, we are left to picture the micro- 
cosm pitted against the macrocosm, as Huxley did, 
and, having done its best, doomed perchance to failure 2 . 
But the evidence will be more, certainly — in principle 

1 On the other hand apart from pluralism, apart that is to say 
from the co-operation of finite agents — from the standpoint of 
absolute singularism — in other words, there would be no meaning in 
process or evolution at all. Call time only appearance if you like; 
still meanwhile this appearance is the universe of our discourse. 

2 Cf. preceding Lecture, p. 360. 



Moral Government of the World 381 

all the external evidence that in an evolving world 
seems possible — if, regarding rational agents and their 
history as an integral part of the one cosmic order and 
the part that gives meaning to the whole, we find no 
hint of purpose or worth in it unless it be the realisa- \ 
tion of the good ; if, further, we find this ideal con- 
sciously adopted as their end by the best part of man- 
kind and unconsciously acknowledged by all inasmuch 
as all seek the good; and if, lastly, we find that even 
physical evils are often ' trials ' that tend to strengthen 
virtue, to enhance and ensure the good attained, but 
never invincible obstacles presenting a solid front such 
that all the powers of good cannot prevail against it. 
All this, as I have said, we do find ; and it means that 
moral order is the order of the world. No one ever 
put this position so forcibly as Fichte : moral order — 
the ordo ordinans he called it, as the parallel of the 
Spinozistic natura naturans — was for him the Absolute, 
a pantheistic moral principle but not a personal God. 
But need we, nay can we, stop here ? So far certainly 
we need not, and Fichte in the end did not. The 
immanence of the good in the world as the informing 
principle of its evolution, the standard of its worth at 
any stage and the end towards which the whole 
creation moves, is not in itself incompatible with the 
transcendent reality of this principle as a Supreme 
Being. To deny this reality may entail no formal 
contradiction ; but it leaves us to face the difficulties of 
absolute pluralism which theism removes and to forego 
the confidence which theism inspires. For order in 
the practical sphere, in the realm of ends, cannot be 
merely a relation, but must imply that zvhich orders, as 



H, 






382 Moral Evil and Moral Order 

Lotze used ever to maintain 1 . That which orders 
then, if it be not the One we have called God, can 
only be the Many who would then be miscalled his 
creatures. It must certainly be in part the latter, if 
morality is to have any meaning ; but why can it not 
be both ? For the existence of moral evil in an 
evolving world like ours would only debar us utterly 
from accepting this solution if such evil were radical 
and absolute. Still, it may be replied, even granting 
that we have no evidence of an essentially evil principle 
at work in the world so far as we know it, yet the part 
of it that we know is exceedingly small : elsewhere 
such a principle may exist. I can only reply by asking 
what conceivable reason could there be for the exist- 
ence of absolute evil ? Its existence would be the 
overthrow of reason altogether, and carry us back at once 
to the absurdities of the pessimism of Schopenhauer 
and von Hartmann. 

It may be well to anticipate a possible but some- 
what perverse objection for the sake of another topic 
to which it naturally leads. We have admitted that if 
theism is to be defensible this must be the best possible 
world, and yet have allowed that a world in which 
moral evil, though it might obtain, actually did not, 
would be a better world than this. Now these two 
positions, it may be said, are inconsistent. But are 
they, provided we carefully distinguish ? This world 
we say is one in which, though moral evil actually 
obtains, it need not. Why does it ? Not because of 
any necessitation on God's part but because of the free 
acts of us, who are joint-workers with him in the 
1 Cf. Microcosmus, Eng. trans. 11. pp. 673 ff. 



The JVorld as a Divine Comedy 383 

world's evolution. So far as God's part in the world 
is concerned, this world and the better world supposed 
are on a par : the inferiority in fact of this world is 
due to us. But can we conceive this world evolving 
orthogenetically, as a biologist would say, without its 
peccability passing over into sin just as its fallibility 
passes over into error ? Perhaps we cannot, but we 
need not therefore deny either that the straight course 
is ideally the better or that the fault is ours. But some 
who seek to vindicate the ways of God to men have 
implicitly denied one or both : the fall equally with 
the creation they refer to God's decree and justify as 
abounding to his glory : the history of the world, though 
a human tragedy, thus, as Martensen has said, becoming 
a divine comedy. It is strange that self-glorification 
should be attributed as a motive to God in a religion 
to which we owe the far higher and more appropriate 
conception of God as Love. But this is not the point 
to which I want now to refer, but rather the idea 
embodied in such words as O felix culpa Adami quae 
meruit talem et tantum habere redemptorem ! referring 
to the denotement of the said drama. Whatever else 
we may think of Jesus of Nazareth called Christ and 
of the religion that he founded, at least we must 
recognise the soul of good, evoked by things evil, 
which they reveal. Nobody ever read Seeley's Ecce 
Homo without being profoundly impressed by this. 
No wonder then that Christian speculation, seeing in 
sin the occasion of this revelation, should have regarded 
the whole so-called ' plan of salvation ' and the evil 
which it presupposes as divinely foreordained. And 
yet surely this cannot be, for to make moral evil 



384 Moral Evil and Moral Order 

essential to the perfection of the world would leave us 
no choice, just as to make it impossible would leave us 
none ; the inevitable can have no moral quality. Such 
doctrine, in a word, overreaches itself. But the more 
good comes even through evil the more reason have 
we for believing the Good and it alone to be verily the 
Supreme. It is in this way that the Christian ideal 
promises to solve the problem of moral evil. 






LECTURE XVIII. 

THEORIES OF A FUTURE LIFE. 

Of all the ills that flesh is heir to, death is commonly 
accounted the chief. And yet if we look only at life on 
this earth and the general economy of nature here, it 
seems hardly disputable that death in itself — apart 
from its possible circumstances — is no evil either for 
the individual or for the species to which this belongs ; 
while it is good for the progress of development on 
the whole. For the individual animal, natural death 
means release after its end — the perpetuation of the 
species — has been accomplished. For the species, 
death in general means the survival of the better 
adapted, the more vigorous and the more enterprising; 
and therefore it means also increased opportunity for 
the advance to life of a higher form. As regards the 
mere animal we may say with Hegel, that "death 
shows the species to be the power that is superior to 
the immediate individual. For the animal, the process 
of the species is the highest point of its vitality. But 
it never gets so far as to have a being for itself within 
its species : on the contrary it is subservient to the 
supremacy of this 1 ." And this is so, we may add, 

1 Encyclopaedia, § 221. 
w. 25 



386 Theories of a Future Life 

because the merely animal individual shows little or no 
trace of true personality : so we have natural histories 
of species, but biographies only of persons. It is only 
in the case of self-conscious beings then that the fact of 
death, in removing them completely from out our bourne 
of time and place, gives rise to anxious questionings. 
We cannot say of them that they existed solely for the 
sake of the species biologically regarded. 

Nor can we say, as Hume did, " that if any purpose 
of nature be clear, we may affirm that the whole scope 
and intention of man's creation, so far as we can judge 
by natural reason, is limited to the present life 1 ." If 
that were so, the universal belief in a future life and all 
man's moral and religious ideals would be unaccount- 
able anomalies, a cruel and senseless mockery without 
a parallel : not in this wise do we interpret the swallow's 
migratory instincts or the squirrel's preparations for 
its winter sleep. Within the whole range of the wide 
world's literature we find no more constant theme than 
just this disparity between man's possibilities and 
aspirations on the one hand and the narrow scope 
afforded them in the brief space of the present life on 
the other. It is true, as we have had to note more 
than once already, that these possibilities and aspira- 
tions belong to the individual man only through his 
organic connexion with the over-individual, Man or 
humanity as a whole. But it does not follow that each 
person is but an instrument subservient to this — le 

1 " On the Immortality of the Soul." Essays, Green and Grose's 
edn, 11. p. 400, one of the essays that Hume suppressed, and well he 
might, for its arguments rest on a cynical and ignoble estimate of 
humanity that has seldom been surpassed. 



Incompleteness of the Present Life 387 

grand Etre so called — is himself in no sense an end but 
just a means : it does not follow that his one function 
is vivre pour autrui and nothing more. As a complex 
machine is only an arrangement of simple machines, so 
— if the individual were only a means — humanity at 
best could only be a system of means, and like the 
machine, could only have an end beyond itself, an end 
in which it had itself no share. If however humanity — 
or to speak more generally, if spiritual society — is an 
end for itself, then the persons who constitute it must 
share in this end. We cannot bring the parts under 
one category and the whole under another. This in- 
consequence is one fatal defect of the Comtian 
1 enthusiasm of humanity,' from which the Christian is 
free 1 . But there is the other defect. The conditions 
of our present life are inadequate to our highest 
personal and therefore also to our highest social ideals. 
" My kingdom," the Christian spirit — nay, the religious 
spirit everywhere — says, " is not of this world." More- 
over evil is not overcome unless it is overcome in each 
individual. 

But while this sense of the incompleteness of our 
personal life if death is to terminate it, has grown with 
our moral and religious progress and is most keenly 
felt by the best of men and by men at their best ; yet, 
on the other hand, the difficulties besetting all our 
attempts to specify — even in the vaguest way — the 
natural conditions of such a life have grown still more 

1 There is the less need to dwell on this point since it has been 
already dealt with very fully by T. H. Green — cf. his Prolego?nena to 
Ethics, §§ 184 ff. The fallacy involved is also clearly exposed by 
Dr McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, % 12 ff. 

25—2 



388 Theories of a Future Life 

remarkably ; and they weigh most heavily on those 
whose knowledge is most profound and whose in- 
telligence is most exacting. We approximate, in a 
word, to a sort of antinomy : what our practical reason 
says ought to be, science tends to say cannot be. The 
qualifications I have used are important. First the 
opposition is not definitely an antinomy : what the 
heart affirms the head does not explicitly deny. 
Physical difficulties in the way of a future life do not 
detract from the moral worth of such life : they may 
even add to it, if moral advance is the condition of 
their removal. The many arguments now in vogue 
against a future life seem never to be directly opposed 1 
to its desirability : what they chiefly contest is its possi- 
bility. Again we say, difficulties do not make a thing 
either impossible or inconceivable ; all therefore that 
science can do is to urge the want of antecedent proba- 
bility, so long as we keep to what we at present know. 
The dogmatic rationalists before Kant's day usually 
disposed in advance of such difficulties by metaphysical 
arguments demonstrating the soul's essential simplicity 
and imperishability. It is true that the subject of 
experience cannot be resolved into a complex of 
subjects, although all experience as interaction implies 
such complexity. Nor can the subject be analysed 

1 "An over-anxious desire to prove the immortality of the soul is 
not by any means an evidence of a religious temper of mind. Indeed, 
the belief in immortality may easily become an unhealthy occupation 
with a future salvation, which prevents us from seeking for salvation 
here." E. Caird, The Evolution of Religion, 1893, vol. 11. p. 243. This 
sort of selfish ' other-worldliness ' has no doubt called forth condemna- 
tion and thus has tended indirectly to discredit the morality of the 
belief in a future life. 



The old 'dogmatic' arguments faulty 389 

into merely objective relations, as in presentationism, 
since objects always imply relation to a subject. So 
far we seem justified in regarding the subject of 
experience as ontal not phenomenal : it is certainly 
the source of all our categories concerning reality — 
substance, cause, end, and the like. But Kant revived 
a distinction which the rationalists' arguments for 
immortality too much overlooked ; though Locke might 
have taught them better — the distinction, I mean, 
between substantial identity and personal identity. 
Such reasonings as those of the Leibniz-Wolffians can 
afford us no assurance of a personal future till personal 
identity is shown to be something more than a 
temporary form or property, any number of which in 
succession the same soul may acquire and lose. Of 
this sort is the immortality assumed in the ancient and 
widely-spread belief in the transmigration of souls. 
The soul is held to remain identically the same, the 
various lives it leads being in general determined by 
the bodies into which it enters. Kant however enter- 
tained a still stranger supposition, not the transmigra- 
tion of the same soul to different bodies, but the 
complete transference of the same personality, that is 
to say the same self-consciousness, to different souls or 
substances, on the analogy of the complete transference 
of the motion of one elastic sphere to another with 
which it collides. Thus on either view all that we 
know as our self-conscious life would have to be 
regarded as a mere accident of the soul whose reality 
it was none the less supposed to reveal. 

But what is preeminently of worth to us is not 
mere persistence of being but just this continuity of 



39° Theories of a Future Life 

our personal life. This, which the theory of metem- 
psychosis seems to sacrifice more or less completely, 
would on Kant's supposition be entirely retained. So 
that if his supposition were sound, we might be content 
with urging, as Lotze has already done, that it yields 
everything that we practically care # about. " No one 
who wished the doctrine of immortality to be assured," 
said Lotze, "'could concern himself with anything but 
that continuity of his consciousness which he desired 
not to lose ; he would be heartily indifferent to the 
question whether the thing in itself which was to be 
the substratum of that continuance occupied in the 
series the position n or (n+i)\" May be, but he 
would be but a very shallow thinker who could be 
assured in such a case. What guarantee should we 
have, if Kant's analogy were sound, that our person- 
ality, being only a bundle of accidents, would always or 
usually be passed on entire ? If our whole conscious- 
ness is separable from its substratum, how are we to 
know whether this is one or many : how can we tell 
what it is, or be sure that it is anything at all ? To all 
these questions save the last Kant's reply is Ignoramus : 
the last it never occurred to him independently to raise 
or seriously to entertain at all. A view of the soul, that 
could lead to such analogies, give rise to such questions, 
and yet furnish no answer to them, we surely may 
suspect. 

Nor is it difficult to find the source of these defects : 

ultimately and in the main it was none other than the 

Essay concerning Human Understanding of our own 

John Locke. Here we find the same analogy, the 

1 Metaphysic, Eng. trans. § 244. 



Category of Substance inadequate 391 

same phenomenal dualism of matter and mind, the one 
perceived by external, the other by internal sense, and 
above all the same category of substance and accident 
applied alike to both. Yet all the while both Locke 
and Kant were aware of facts incompatible with thus 
levelling down all the constituents of experience to one 
plane and handling all with the same categories. This 
Locke showed in his recognition of the knowledge of 
our own existence as intuitive and our knowledge of 
the existence of other finite beings as only sensible ; 
and still more Kant in his recognition — in what he 
called the synthetic unity of apperception — of every 
subject of experience as, to use Lotze's words, ' an 
independent centre of action and reaction.' The very 
abstractness of the category of substance which led 
Kant to formulate the principle now known as the 
conservation of mass, and his description of substance 
as the name given to the phenomenon that is thus 
conserved, show clearly the inapplicability of this 
category of substance and accident to what Kant him- 
self has over and over again emphatically declared is 
not phenomenal. His attempts to resolve it into some 
tertium quid between phenomenon and thing per se 
plainly indicate that he had taken more of Hume into 
his system than it could assimilate. His constant 
shuffling of transcendental Ego, logical Ego and 
empirical Ego forcibly reminds one of thimble-rigging. 
Let us then make bold to regard our self-conscious 
life, not as a flux of accidents pertaining with we know 
not what all beside to some substratum or other, but as 
the actions and reactions of a thing per se or rather of a 
subject in a world. of such, as the intercourse of such a 



39 2 Theories of a Fuhire Life 

subject with other subjects. Instead of regarding all 
souls as substances we have proceeded rather on the 
spiritualistic interpretation of all substances as souls. 
And it is worth remarking that a monadology of this 
sort still haunted Kant's speculation from his earlier 
days and was constantly cropping out in his later 
critical writings 1 . This is notably the case, for example, 
in his solution of the third antinomy ; for the logical 
possibility of freedom, whereby the solution is effected, 
presupposes the actual existence of a plurality of things 
per se or substances, whose actions determine the so- 
called course of nature 2 . Between the abstract category 
of substance and what we may call the real category of 
things or substances, from which it is abstracted, there 
is a world of difference. The history of philosophy, I 
incline to think, shows this abstract concept of sub- 
stance to be, as Schopenhauer maintained, either 
useless or mischievous. If the individuality of the 
concrete thing is dropped then substance becomes 
synonymous with matter or stuff — for which ' form ' is 
but an accident — this is indeed its popular meaning 
and the meaning too unquestionably the predominant 
one with Kant. The mischief, as respects our present 
problem, begins when mind too is regarded as substance, 
as it was by Descartes and Locke. But apart from the 
categories of individuality and activity that of sub- 
stantiality is inadequate to define either the idea of God 
or that of a soul. It is also too indeterminate and empty 

1 Cf. B. Erdmann's Kanfs Kriticismus u. s. zv., 1878, pp. 73 — 75 : 
also a dissertation by a pupil of Erdmann's, O. Riedel, Die mona- 
dologischen Bestimtnungen in Kanfs Lehre vom Ding an sich, 1884. 

2 Cf. above, Lecture xiv. pp. 302 ff. 



The question a question as to Value 393 

to admit of either individuality or causality being 
deduced or dialectically developed from it, though 
itself readily to be abstracted from the concrete 
' things ' with qualities which manifest their being by 
their activity 1 . 

But if we were to discard the category of substanti- 
ality and content ourselves with that of mere actuality, 
what reasons would remain for expecting our life to 
continue indefinitely ? Well, at any rate the category 
of substance will not furnish a reason : it would at best 
only state the fact, or rather only subtly beg the 
question. So far perhaps we may agree with what 
Lotze intended in saying: — "The question of the im- 
mortality of the soul does not belong to Metaphysic. 
We have no other principle for deciding it," he con- 
tinues, " beyond this general idealistic conviction : — 
every created thing will continue, if and so long as its 
continuance belongs to the meaning of the world ; 
every one will pass away, whose actuality had only in 
some transitory phase of the world's course a place 
(S telle) that justified it 2 ." But it would still remain an 
open question whether the evolution of the world's 
meaning would not be at least as well met, (and a more 
intimate unity and continuity secured,) by the mutual 
adaptations and adjustments of the same individuals, 
as by the annihilation of some and the creation of 
others. Anyhow it is meanwhile safe to say — strange 
as it may sound — that we have no positive evidence, 
either a posteriori or a priori, that the latter is the 

1 Cf. Sigwart, Logik, 2nd edn, § 77 (1); Lotze, Metaphysik, § 245 ; 
Naturalism and Agnosticism, 3rd edn, vol. 11. pp. 192 ff. 

2 Metaphysik, loc. at. 



394 Theories of a Future Life 

method which in fact obtains. We say All men are 
mortal, but not one of us has experienced death ; not 
one of us knows anything therefore of what for the 
subject immediately concerned it really is. If we knew 
that the individual's existence began with that of the 
body, we might argue that it would also probably end 
with it : but here again the empirical basis for such an 
argument fails us. Finally, if the materialist's con- 
tention were established, if soul and body were shown 
to be identical, that certainly would leave no further 
room for doubt. But we may say with some confidence 
that science itself has once for all renounced materialism 
of this sort 1 . Altogether — so far as the mere persist- 
ence of the individual subject now actually existing 
goes — we may fairly maintain that the burden of proof 
after all rests with those who would dogmatically 
deny it. 

But, as already said, the mere persistence of the 
individual subject will not content us : it is in the 
continuity of our personal life that we are supremely 
(interested, and facts force us to admit that we cannot 
straightway infer the one from the other. It seems 
useless to say 

The eternal form will still divide 
The eternal soul from all beside, 

unless we have some basis for conjecturing how much 

1 " If the belief in immortality is essential to morality, physical 
science has no more to say against the probability of that doctrine 
than the most ordinary experience has, and it effectually closes the 
mouths of those who pretend to refute it by objections deduced from 
merely physical data." Huxley, 'Science and Morals,' Collected Essays, 
vol. ix. p. 143. 



Continuity of Memory 395 

or how little can be 'eternal form.' Whatever has 
been gradually acquired, may for all we know be lost 
again ; and indeed much of it, so far as present 
experience goes, appears, at first sight, to be entirely 
lost. Some continuity of memory is indispensable to 
personal continuity, and is commonly held to require 
some continuity of organism. Continuity of environ- 
ment again appears not only to be a necessary condition 
of organic continuity, but to be also essential to any 
further personal development. But how is such con- 
tinuity conceivable beyond the grave ? 

As ' regards memory the difficulties so commonly 
felt are largely due to bad psychology. Memory, 
though common thought and language associate it so 
intimately with objective records, obviously cannot be 
really identified with these ; for they presuppose it 1 . Of 
the subjective function, apart from which records are 
not records, no explanation, no definition or description 
even, that does not already imply it, has — so far as I 
know — ever been, or — as I believe — ever will be given. 
We are tempted perhaps sometimes to describe memory 
as the perception of what is distant in the past and to 
develop the many analogies there are between it and 
the perception of what is distant in space. But one 
difference at any rate there is and that difference is 
fundamental. Distance in space implies only objective 
order : two men walking together may both see the 
same landmark, say a mile in front of them ; but 
though they may look back a year in time, the experi- 
ences they remember will strictly speaking never be in 
a like sense the same. Memory furnishes us with no 
1 Cf. Naturalism and Agnosticism^ vol. II. pp. 156 — 159. 



396 Theories of a Future Life 

such common range in time as vision yields us in 
space : there is at least this much justification for 
Kant's treatment of time as the form of internal 
perception. The subjective marks peculiar to memory 
proper cannot be identified with any merely objective 
order ; and so, we may question if all connexion between 
the subject and its past experience is permanently dis- 
solved simply by the apparent obliteration of certain 
objective records. Hence the truth — so far — of Fries's 
contention that the problem to explain is not memory 
but obliviscence : about that there is, however, no 
special difficulty 1 . 

Moreover, strictly speaking, the universe contains 
at this moment the potential record of every event 
that has ever happened ; and every subject, that has 
advanced beyond the ideal limit of the ' naked monad/ 
is able to some extent to read this record, and to read 
it to a greater extent and more distinctly the further its 
own experience has developed. And again, at the level 
of self-consciousness, over and above the merely passive 
memory or reminiscence, that has to wait till the record 
is clear, we have the active memory or recollection that 
can search its own archives; and we have also the 
intelligence that can seek out and interpret other 
records beyond any imaginable limit. The gradual 
achievement of such increased independence and 

1 Herein the analogy with space holds good. Distant objects in 
a landscape can in general only be clearly seen if they are of sufficient 
magnitude, and distant events in a lifetime can in general only be 
clearly remembered if they are of sufficient moment. Again as there 
may be positive obstructions in the way of our vision so there may be 
in the way of our memory, and the body — as in disease — is known to 
be a frequent source of such obstructions. 



Memory and Objective Records 397 

initiative is just that advance from sentient individual 
to rational person, from soul to spirit, which philosophy 
from Plato onwards has steadily recognised as a fact, 
though it has seldom ventured to account for it as 
a continuous development. If now — in addition to the 
subjective factor implied in all memory — we take into 
account this increased independence which the spiritual 
level secures, and along with this the fact that in what 
we may call the world order the new is continuous 
with the old, we surely have some ground for thinking 
it possible that the departed spirit may re-collect itself, 
even without the body. Nay, it will not be absurd to 
suppose with Kant that at this level " the separation | 
from the body would be the end of the sensuous 
employment and the beginning of the intelligible em- 
ployment of our faculty of knowledge. The body would 
then have to be considered, not as the cause of our 
thinking but only as a restrictive condition of it and 
therefore... as an impediment of our pure and spiritual 
life 1 ." The spirit is often willing when the flesh is 
weak ; but here we have a literal rising through its 
death to higher things. At any rate we must hold 
firmly to the position that it is function that determines 
structure, not structure that determines function ; that ' 
the soul is the entelechy of the body, not vice versa, to 
use the phrase of Aristotle's which Leibniz adopted. 
It then surely becomes reasonable to suppose that the 
spirit that has so far transcended the body is not wholly 
undone with its undoing, emphatically reasonable if we 
find, when we come presently to inquire, that there are 

1 Critique of the Pure Reason, ist edn, p. 778. Max Miiller's 
trans., p. 667. 



398 Theories of a F^lture Life 

teleological grounds of supreme moment, why this 
should not be. 

And yet, we must allow that we can hardly frame 
more than the vaguest conjectures how — so far as it is 
verily disembodied — the soul or spirit proceeds, if needs 
be, to clothe itself anew ; albeit we have no reason to 
regard it, let me remark again, as reduced in the 
interim to the level of a naked monad. But there is. 
at any rate a closely analogous case, where a like 
renewal actually happens, though our ignorance of the 
process is almost as complete. But if we knew abso- 
lutely nothing of embryology, and if it happened — as 
Leibniz in fact supposed — that the process of dying 
consisted in a reversal or ' involution ' of the process 
of growth and differentiation, so that the true corpse,, 
so to say, should be again nothing but a tiny and 
apparently homogeneous speck of protoplasm — so small 
that a few consecrated pill-boxes might almost suffice 
for the campi santi of the world — we should, I fancy, 
be quite as sure as we can now be that the renewal of 
such a life was an idle dream. And yet in the embryo,, 
a like speck, we have 

Although the print be little, the whole matter 
And copy of the father, — eyes, nose, lip, 



The very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger. 

May we not then suppose that if the germinal soul can 
accomplish so much the separated spirit can accomplish 
more 1 ? But it will be replied the germ is an organism, 

1 I have, since writing the above, chanced upon the following 
interesting anticipation : — "Abstractly considered, that is considered 
without relation to the difference which habit and merely habit 



'Involution' and Germination 399 

not a disembodied soul. That is true unquestionably 
and it is important ; for any continuity of life with no 
continuity of either organism or environment seems 
quite inconceivable. But there is nothing in our 
present knowledge to show that there cannot be any 
other mode of embodiment than that with which we 
are here familiar, and that we have not manifold other 
relations with our environment besides those which the 
organism as we know it is supposed to explain — or 
rather perhaps that our environment has not such rela- 
tions with us, of which we at present have no clear 
consciousness. It is futile to attempt to specify these 
possibilities by imagining an astral body, an ethereal 
body or the like ; and to talk of a subliminal self seems 
only to betray ignorance of the real problem, which 
relates not to the self but to the continuance after 
death of its rapport with the world. 

But we may at least lay stress on the tremendous 
gap in our scientific knowledge concerning the inter- / 
action of body and mind — a gap which there seems no 
prospect of our filling up, whether we work, so to say, 
outwards from psychology or inwards from physiology 
— if such inaccurate phraseology may be for brevity's 

produces in our faculties and modes of apprehension, I do not see 
anything more in the resurrection of a dead man than in the con- 
ception of a child; except it be this that the one comes into his world 
with a system of prior consciousness about him, while the other does 
not : and no person will say that he knows enough of either subject 
to perceive that this circumstance makes such a difference in the two 
cases, that the one should be easy, and the other not so. To the 
first man, the succession of the species would be as incomprehensible 
as the resurrection of the dead is to us." Paley, Evidences of Christi- 
anity ', Tegg's edn of his works, p. 114. 



400 Theories of a Ftiture Life 

sake allowed. Here there must be facts in plenty of 
which we are wholly ignorant, and here, it may be, that 
as an original but little known writer has supposed, 
" in the course of this life the nervous system by its 
ultimate habitudes should frame a finer organization, 
and that this in the moment and act of death should 
be disentangled from the coarser frame 1 ." Or more 
likely, it may be, as Bonnet and the younger Fichte 
supposed, that within the changeable ' external body ' 
there is from the first an ' inner body ' that shapes it 
and outlasts it 2 . Or again, with still more probability, 
it may be, as Thiele supposed, that this invisible body 
is not built up from without nor present from the first 
as ' form-principle ' of the external and changing body, 
but that it will be gradually elaborated as the soul's 
development requires, just as the bodies which it has 
outworn were elaborated to subserve its needs during 
the lower stages of its development 8 . But all such 
hypotheses, and there are many, like the gap in our 
knowledge that leaves room for them, do not reach 
beyond the dualism of common thought ; fail in fact to 
get down to the bed-rock of experience that underlies 
all such problems. More fundamental than any seem- 
ing dualism of body and soul is the duality of subject 
and object in experience, and this — for spiritualistic 
monism — means the interaction of subjects with other 

1 W. Cyples, An Inquiry into the Process of Human Experience, 
London, 1880, p. 431. 

2 C. Bonnet, La palingenesie philosophique, 1769. J. H. Fichte, 
Psychologie, 1864, 1. pp. 63 f. A similar view, it is interesting to 
note, was entertained by the physicists, Balfour Stewart and Tait : 
cf. The Unseen Universe, 2nd edn, 1875, PP- 1 S9^- 

3 G. Thiele, Die Philosophic des Setbstsbeivusstseins, 1895, pp. 506 f. 



Continuity of Environment 401 

subjects, transcends the opposition of person and thing. 
It means too, that the organism is the result of such 
subjective interaction, not that this interaction is the 
result of it ; more generally still, that subjects are 
the prime agents in maintaining the so-called physical 
world, not this the prime agent by which they are 
passively sustained. Till naturalism succeeds in con- 
verting this position the way to belief in a future life 
will always be open. 

But again as regards the future environment we 
must admit, as in the case of the future organism, that 
in the complete absence of any experience we can do 
no more than conjecture. And obviously, if we are 
ignorant of the organism that is to be, we must be 
ignorant also of its specific environment ; and vice versa. 
But after all, as just now said, there is for spiritualism 
no sharp line between the two, indeed even for 
materialism there is none : for the one as for the other, 
the organism is continuous with, and a part of, the 
objective world. All that we can reasonably assert is 
that between the old life and the new there must be 
some continuity of experience, if the new life is to be 
regarded as a future life and not as merely another life. 
There are two views to be considered : that of trans- 
migration or reincarnation, accepted by the majority of 
the human race, and that of transfiguration, if we may 
so call it, prevalent among Christians. The one secures 
a continuity of environment that satisfies the imagina- 
tion of survivors, but at the sacrifice more or less com- 
plete of that personal continuity which we must regard 
as essential. The other preserves this, but transfers it 
to an unseen world difficult to realise. 

w. 26 



402 Theories of a Future Life 

The objection to transmigration or metempsychosis 1 
has been met by assuming that the personal discon- 
tinuity is only temporary, and that the successive lives 
of a given subject may be eventually connected through 
continuous but latent memories that are revived after 
death or when all the soul's Wanderjahre are over 2 . 
But even so, if this series is to have any real continuity 
or meaning, if it is to be not merely a series but a pro- 
gression, then at every return to life, either Providence 
must determine, or the naturient soul must itself select, 
its appropriate reincarnation. Otherwise, if disem- 
bodied souls are to be blown about by the winds of 
circumstance like other seeds, we should only have a 
repetition of that outrageous fortune which the doctrine 
of transmigration was supposed to redress : the con- 
tingency that seems to pertain to the one birth we know 
of would only be manifolded, not removed. 

This difficulty in turn has been met by the further 
and bolder assumption, that disembodied souls do in 
fact steer their own way back to a suitable re-birth. 
An atom liberated from its molecular bonds is described 
as manifesting an unwonted activity, technically known 
as ' the nascent state ' ; but still it does not recombine 
indifferently with the first free atom that it encoun- 
ters, but only with one for which it has an ' affinity.' 
And " there seems to be nothing more strange or 

1 This term though commonly in use is obviously inaccurate. 
If we must needs have a Greek word, /xercvo-w/AaTwo-ts used by Clem. 
Alex, is preferable. 

2 So, for example, Professor Campbell Fraser thinks. Cf. his 
Theism, vol. n. p. 249. And still more definitely Renouvier, Le 
Persomm/ispie, 1903, p. 220. A similar view was held by Max 
Drossbach, J. Reynaud and many others. 



Difficulties to be met 403 

paradoxical," it has been said, " in the suggestion that 
each person enters into connexion with the body that 
is most fitted to be connected with him 1 ." But the 
affinities of a given atom are, so far as we know, any- 
thing but select : not only will it combine with others 
of many kinds, but it seems to be absolutely indifferent 
to individuals within a kind. So far this analogy then, 
if it justified any inference at all, would, it may well be 
thought, hardly warrant us in expecting each person to 
find his next incarnation even within the species Homo 
sapiens. Still less would it lead us to expect that he 
could secure such parentage and surroundings as to 
admit of his turning the best of his past powers — as 
poet or patriot say — to full account, assuming that with 
the temporary lapse of definite memories these could 
be still retained. 

But on the other hand it may be fairly urged that 
a liberated spirit ought to be credited with vastly more 
savoir vivre than a liberated atom. Further it must 
be allowed that this suggestion is quite in keeping with 
the conservation of values, which men like Lotze and 
Hoffding regard as axiomatic — at any rate experience 
often verifies, and never certainly belies it 2 . Finally it 
minimises the objection to personal continuity that is 
often based on the facts of heredity 3 . And for my part 

1 McTaggart, Some Dogmas of Religion, 1906, p. 126. 

2 Cf. Lecture x. pp. 2 1 2 f., and Tennyson, InMemoriam, canto xlv : — 

This use may lie in blood and breath, 
Which else were fruitless of their due, 
Had man to learn himself anew 

Beyond the second birth of death. 

3 It is worth while to note that against this objection Kant 
proposed a similar reply, the "transcendental hypothesis, namely, 

26 — 2 



404 Theories of a Future Life 

I must confess that this difficulty seems by far the most 
serious of any that beset the hypothesis of a plurality 
of lives. The traducian doctrine of the soul's origin is 
hard to reconcile with any true spiritualism, while the 
creationist doctrine is alien to the theory of evolution 
and open to other obvious difficulties besides. Indeed, 
if by difficulty we mean something that we fail to work 
in with, and adjust to, facts or ideas that we accept 
absolutely ; then I make bold to deny, Dr Rashdall 
notwithstanding 1 , that the theory of pre-existence 
1 creates new difficulties.' It involves 'a ramifying 
network ' of assumptions unquestionably ; but if it ' is 
certainly not capable of positive disproof,' the objector 
is bound to show that the result of the whole is worth- 
less. Till then, summarily to reject it involves the still 
more extravagant assumption that we have exhausted 
all possibilities and that what may be only our lack of 
knowledge of its empirical conditions is tantamount to 
a proof of its impossibility 2 . As Kant, whose words I 
have adopted, has said, this arrogance of negation does 

tthat all life is really intelligible only, not subject to the changes of 
time, and neither beginning in birth nor ending in death... that if we 
could intuite ourselves and other things as they really are, we should 
see ourselves in a world of spiritual natures, with which our only 
true community did neither begin at birth nor will end with the death 
of the body, both being merely phenomena" {Critique of the Pure 
Reason, M. Miiller's trans, p. 668). It is also interesting to learn 
that shortly before the publication of the Critique Kant dogmatically 
taught both the pre-existence and the immortality of the soul. Cf. 
Max Heinze, Vorlesungen Kanfs iiber Metaphysik, 1894, p. 547 
of the reprint from the Transactions of the Royal Society of 
Saxony. 

1 Theory of Good and Evil, 1907, vol. 11. pp. 346 f. 

2 Cf. Kant, Critique, 1st edn, p. 780, M.M. p. 681. 



Pre-existence 405 

not eliminate in the least the practical value of such 
hypotheses. The appeal to ignorance no doubt cuts 
both ways : it does not allow us to treat hypotheses 
as knowledge, but on the other hand it does not destroy 
their working utility if, consistently with what we do 
know, they enable us even tentatively to reach a com- 
pleter and more satisfactory Weltanschauung. As 
regards this particular hypothesis of pre-existence and 
a plurality of lives, its complexity is no advantage 
certainly ; but even so the disadvantage is reduced in 
proportion as the separate assumptions are analogous 
with actual experience and consilient with each other. 
After all it should give the scornful objector pause, to 
think how many of the vital processes, about which we 
have definite knowledge, involve an elaborate adjust- 
ment of multifarious details that would be utterly in- 
credible but for its familiarity. Is it then unreasonable 
to expect still more marvellous conjunctions in the wider 
dimensions of the world beyond the grave ? And is it not 
also possible — just because of such wider dimensions — 
that what to us seems complicated or impossible is 
really as simple as say movement into a third dimen- 
sion, which yet a being confined to two might fail to 
understand ? To the theist at any rate it is conceiv- 
able that, without any arbitrary interventions, subjective 
processes and objective influences may be there at 
work which are not merely retributive but remedial 
also. Such notions are of course more or less akin to 
the Christian doctrines of purgatory, angels, interces- 
sion and the like. 

This brings us naturally to the theory of the future 
life characteristic of Christianity, viz. as a final and 



406 Theories of a Future Life 

irrevocable state of existence in a so-called unseen and 
eternal world. The difficulty here is not so much our 
inability to imagine such a purely spiritual form of life ; 
but rather the utter gulf that according to this doctrine 
must lie between this life and ours. That a man 
should pass at once from earth to heaven or hell seems 
irrational and inequitable ; and the lapse of ages of 
suspended consciousness, if this were conceivable, 
would not diminish this discontinuity. But between 
one active life and another there may well be such an 
intermediate state of mental rumination, so to say, and 
reflexion, as many theologians have assumed. This 
state, it has been said, "is not a domain of deeds and 
works, for the external conditions for these are wanting 
...it is the domain of inwardness, of silent consideration 
and pondering, a domain of recollection (Erinnerung) 
in the full sense of the word 1 ." We can perhaps suppose 
that this process may be a preparation for a new life, 
as just now hinted, provided — though with re-birth, 
the body, as Plotinus held, " be the true river of Lethe, 
and the soul plunged in it forgets all " — the change in 
character is notwithstanding still somehow retained. 
But it is hardly credible that any spiritual clarifying 
based on a single life — or series of lives — that is not 
more refined and matured than ours, could fit many, or 
indeed any, of the children of men for that final con- 
summation which Christianity describes as eternal life. 
At length, however, and sooner for some than for 

1 Martensen, Die christliche Dogmatik, 1856, § 275. Such a self- 
purgatory of all souls seems a worthier idea than the one-sided ex- 
piatory purgatory of the Romish Church, which has so little moral 
efficacy that it may be curtailed by extraneous ceremonial. 



The Christian ' Transfiguration ' 407 

others, a stage might be reached, when — so to say — 
the ' disembodied ' spirit would pass beyond the range 
of attraction of the seen and temporal and enter the 
confines of the eternal world ; at once tending towards, 
and drawn on by, that outer constellation of the choir 
invisible, to which it is best attuned. 

But now in conclusion, again recognising to the 
full the conjectural character of all these details, we 
may nevertheless still maintain that they are of great use 
in helping us to realise more definitely the possibility 
of a future life. On the main issue round which these 
speculations turn, we must at least insist, viz. that if such 
life is to have any worth or meaning, a certain personal 
continuity and continuity of development is essential. 
From this point of view death becomes indeed but 
a longer sleep dividing life from life as sleep divides 
day from day ; and as there is progress from day to 
day so too there may be from life to life. And we 
may perhaps see another resemblance. As we often 
do things better for sleeping over them — though we 
remember nothing of the subconscious processes through 
which our plans have matured — so we may do better 
in a future life, though the new awakening has crowded 
out the memories of our sojourn in the other world. 
In one important point indeed the analogy seems to 
fail : our waking life is a continuous whole, the series 
of repeated lives at first is not. But even here on the 
assumption that in the purely spiritual life of the other 
world this continuity is resumed, the analogy again 
holds good. We have then however to equate our 
earthly lives to dreams and death becomes not a sleep- 
ing but an awaking : Mors janua vitae. And perhaps 



408 Theories of a Future Life 

it will seem less strange so to regard it, the more we 
think of the possibilities that the spiritual world may 
enfold. 

It still remains, however, to consider what solid 
grounds we have for attaching any weight to these 
open possibilities. 



LECTURE XIX. 



FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE. 



It was the hopelessness of the problem of evil, if 
this life is all, that brought us to the question of further 
life beyond the grave. Having now found reason for 
thinking that such a life can quite well be, we come to 
the moral arguments why it should be. 

Of these at once the most ancient and the most 
universal is perhaps the juridical or retributive argu- 
ment : — a man's lot in this life is 'a judgment' on his 
conduct in preceding lives ; and in the next he will be 
rewarded or punished for what he has done here. But 
the morality of our time has largely outgrown the 
paedagogic functions of such external sanctions and 
has found a truer and worthier interpretation of what 
they but crudely and imperfectly express. The con- 
cluding proposition of Spinoza's Ethics is the last word 
here : " Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but 
virtue itself." And so, of course, mutatis mutandis, of 
vice. The one fundamental argument for more life is 
not the need for adequate compensations — but for 
adequate opportunities, not the demand for fairer 
wages but for fuller work. A man is immortal till his 
work is done, we say ; and it is because we see that 
his work is not done, that his capacities are not worked 



410 Faith and Knowledge 

out here, that we feel confident that death is not the 
end of him. For all things work together for good, we 
hold : indeed, to what other end and how else could 
they really or reasonably work together at all ? This 
is our fundamental postulate and the ultimate ratio 
cognoscendi of the theistic position. So then we may 
say with Professor Royce : — " If death is real at all it is 
real only in so far as it fulfils a purpose. But now, 
what purpose," he asks, " can be fulfilled by the ending 
of a life that is so far unfulfilled?" 1 In fine, the problem 
of evil seems insoluble, and any theodicy impossible, if 
this life be all. " Whoever believes in a God" said 
Rothe, "must also believe in the continuance of man 
after death. Without that there would not be a world 
that could be thought of as [realising] God's purpose 2 ." 
Thus the one main argument, as I have called it, is 
entirely a moral argument : without it the ' open possi- 
bilities ' we have just been considering would have no 
weight, and even with it they are not converted into 
scientific certainties. It may lead to faith but it cannot 
anticipate experience of what is J behind the veil ' of all 
we know. 

This moral argument has been put several times 
with unusual power and eloquence in our recent litera- 
ture, as for example by Martineau, Royce, Laurie and 
others ; for this reason I do not propose to enlarge 
upon it here, but only briefly to return to it presently, 
when dealing generally with Faith. There is how- 
ever one earlier statement summing up the whole 
subject, part of which I will quote, as it leads on 

1 The World and the Individual, n. p. 440. 

2 Stille Stunden, p. 219, quoted by Martineau. 



The Moral Argument for Immortality 411 

naturally to this topic, which I would now invite you to 
consider next. The passage occurs at the end of 
Kant's severe criticism of the supposed theoretical 'proofs 
of immortality prevalent in his time. Having there 
shown ' the impossibility of settling anything dogmatic- 
ally with reference to an object of experience beyond 
the limits of experience' he concludes: — "Nothing is 
lost, however, by this with regard to the right, nay the 
necessity of admitting a future life. ...The proofs which 
are useful for the world at large retain their value un- 
diminished, nay, they gain in clearness, simplicity, and 
power when stripped of such dogmatic pretensions ; 
for they bring reason back to its own peculiar domain, 
the realm of ends, which is, however, at the same time 
a realm of nature. But there too reason, as in itself a 
practical faculty, is entitled, without being confined to 
the conditions of nature, to extend the realm of ends 
and with it our own existence beyond the limits of our 
present experience and life. According to analogy 
with the nature of living beings in this world, concern- 
ing which reason must necessarily assume the principle 
that no organ, no faculty, no impulse, in short nothing 
superfluous or disproportionate to its use, and therefore 
aimless, is to be met with ; that on the contrary every 
being is precisely adapted to its vocation in life — 
according to this analogy, man, who yet alone can 
contain within himself the final end of all this, must 
needs be the only creature that is an exception to the 
principle. For not only his native capacities... but pre- 
eminently the moral law within him, go so far beyond 
all utility and advantage to be derived from them 
in this life, that the latter [the moral law] even instructs 



412 Faith and Knowledge 

him, in the absence of all advantages, yes, even of the 
shadowy hope of posthumous fame, to esteem the mere 
consciousness of rectitude above all else and to feel an 
inner call, by his conduct in this world... to make him- 
self worthy to be the citizen of a better, of which he 
possesses [only] the idea. This powerful proof, never 
to be controverted, accompanied by our constantly 
increasing acquaintance with the purposiveness per- 
vading all that we see around us, by the prospect of 
the immensity of creation and therefore also by the 
consciousness of a certain illimitability in the possible 
extension of our knowledge along with an instinct 
commensurate to it, all this remains and always will 
remain, even though we must give up [the hope] from 
the merely theoretical knowledge of ourselves of 
understanding the necessary continuance of our 
existence 1 ." 

Here we have necessary continuance of existence 
asserted, though from the nature of the case all know- 
ledge is denied, and asserted because of an incon- 
trovertible proof of what theoretically we cannot 
understand ! Surely this is a paradox if ever there 
was one. Yet underlying this paradox we shall find 
the basis on which the whole philosophy of theism 
rests. To Kant belongs the credit of having first 
made this clear, and that by his distinction, so often 
misunderstood, between the practical and the theoretical, 
use of reason and by his insistence on what he called 
the primacy of the former. Ignoring this distinction 
or assuming without question that the right to believe 

1 Critique of the Pure Reason, 2nd edn, pp. 424 ff. Max Miiller's 
translation (amended), vol. 11. pp. 504 ff. 






The Primacy of the Practical Reason 413 

in God and a future life is no better than the wish, the 
agnostic simply asks with Huxley: "Why trouble 
ourselves about matters of which, however important 
they may be, we do know nothing, and can know 
nothing P 1 " Or still more emphatically with Clifford 
he sums up his ethics of belief by declaring that "it is 
wrong always, everywhere and for any one, to believe 
anything upon insufficient evidence 2 ." One tale is 
good till another is told : so all this agnosticism is true 
and trite so far as logic goes. But there is more in life 
than logic, and it is just its primary factor that our 
agnostics overlook. " The state of things is evidently 
far from simple : and pure insight and logic, whatever 
they might do ideally, are not the only things that 
really do produce our creeds 3 ," as William James 
said in a classical essay that has made this theme 
one of the burning questions of our time. This, the 
connexion of faith and knowledge, is our present topic. 
First of all we have only to recall facts that in the 
course of these lectures we have already had to deal 
with more than once. The whole process of the 
world, concretely regarded, we have found, so far as 
we have been able to trace it, is a process of evolution. 
Experience then means becoming expert by experi- 
ment. We do not begin by knowing but by learning. 
We gain knowledge by merely doing — and that whether 
we succeed or fail — and we gain it solely by doing : in 
the first instance at least, or by the race, it has been 

1 Collected Essays, vol. i. p. 162. 

2 Lectures and Essays, 2nd edn, 1886, 'The Ethics of Belief,' 
p. 346. 

3 The Will to Believe, p. 11. 



41 4 Faith and Knowledge 

gained only in this way. Hence that 'primitive 
credulity ' or trustfulness that characterizes our earliest 
enterprises, when we do not wait till there are certain 
and sufficient reasons for action : it is enough for 
youthful energy if there are none such against action. 
And happily it is so ; for otherwise we might still 
be what according to the zoologists our earliest known 
forebears, the Social Ascidians, were in the long long 
past and so in the clear green sea to this day remain. 
Kant, it is worth remarking, was fully awake to this 
point and refers to it teleologically in connexion with 
this very question of the relation of the theoretical to 
the practical reason. "If we were not designed,'' he 
said, " to exert our powers till we were assured of our 
ability to attain our object, those powers would remain 
for the most part unused. For in general it is only by 
trying that we first of all learn what they are 1 ." Life 
is made up of such attempts : self-betterment is its 
main endeavour ; knowledge is obtained only as fast 
and as far as this paramount interest prompts us to 
hew efforts, and is valued primarily as a means to that 
end. What is learnt takes at first the form not of 
theoretical propositions, but of practical maxims, which 
are thought of not as true but as useful. This differ- 
ence is far deeper than it seems. In the first place, 
such maxims are subjectively imposed imperatives 
rather than objectively necessary affirmations ; in the 
next place, they imply always the concept of worth or 
value, a teleological category to which there is no 
purely objective counterpart ; finally, maxims are true 

1 Kritik der Urtheilsktaft^ Werke, Hartenstein's edn, v. p. 184 
note. 



Connexion of Faith and Knowledge 415 

— or, as we say, sound — or they are the contrary, 
solely in view of their practical consequences ; de- 
duction from objective premisses is rarely thought of 
and would usually be impossible. Such is experience 
for the individual and in the concrete at all events. 
Conation is here the fundamental fact, at once the 
source of faith and the cause of knowledge. And 
there is here no dualism between the two : both merge 
in that primitive credulity which leads us to trust and 
to try before we know. 

And now if we take a wider sweep and glance back 
at the history of the organic world, describing it, if you 
will, analogically, in terms of experience rather than in 
the language of biology — in which, however, such 
terms are more or less covertly implied — the parable 
will not be uninstructive. We shall find that almost 
every forward step in the progress of life could be 
formulated as an act of faith — an act not warranted by 
knowledge — on the part of the pioneer who first made 
it. There was little, for example, in all that the wisest 
fish could know, to justify the belief that there was 
more scope for existence on the earth than in the 
water, or to show that persistent endeavours to live on 
land would issue in the transformation of his swim- 
bladder into lungs 1 . And before a bird had cleaved 
the air there was surely little, in all that the most daring 
of saurian speculators could see or surmise concerning 
that untrodden element, to warrant him in risking his 
neck in order to satisfy his longing to soar ; although, 
when he did try, his forelimbs were transformed to 

1 This being the process by which according to the teaching of 
biology reptiles first arose. 



416 Faith and Knowledge 

wings at length, and his dim prevision of a bird became 
incarnate in himself 1 . So put, these instances will seem 
largely fanciful, I am well aware — too Lamarckian even 
for Lamarck. Still they serve to bring out the one 
fact, viz. that when we regard the development of 
living forms as a continuous whole, we are forced to 
recognise, as immanent and operative throughout it, a 
sort of unscientific trustfulness, that from the very first 
seems to have been engrained in all living things. 
This trustfulness — might I say ? — is comparable to the 
faith of Abraham, who, " when he was called to go out 
into a place which he should after receive for an in- 
heritance, obeyed and went out, not knowing whither 
he went." No doubt with perfect knowledge all this 
would be otherwise ; but the point is that with limited 
knowledge such as ours there is always 'room for 
faith,' and always need for it : here the maxim holds, 
" Nothing venture nothing have." We trust and try 
first, not understanding till afterwards : our attitude in 
short is not unlike that of Anselm's famous Credo ut 
intelligam. 

So far, then — psychologically and historically — 
there is nothing unique in the faith of theism at all ; it 
is only the full and final phase of an ascending series, 
beginning in an instinctive belief in the relatively 
better and ending in the rational belief in the abso- 
lutely Good, with its corollaries, the existence of God 
and the life hereafter. The gradual advance through 
impulse and desire to practical reason runs throughout 
on all fours with the advance through sensation and 

1 The first birds, we learn from certain fossil remains, were 
developed from a sort of lizard. 



Faith and Logic 417 

imagination to theoretical reason. At every stage the 
two form one experience, knowledge registering its 
progress and practical enterprise promoting it. Such 
enterprises imply faith, but we have this faith not 
solely ' on account of the very limited amount of our 
knowledge and the possible errors in it.' In such 
enterprises our attitude is not cognitive but conative : 
we are not from ' want of knowledge on any subject 
coming to a particular conclusion on that subject.' 
But as active beings striving for betterment we see 
that the way is not closed against us and so we try to 
advance : we do so because such is our nature, and 
because our past experience justifies our faith. 

But still, when we speak of reason qua practical 
having faith, we recognise that we have passed beyond 
the merely conative stage ; just as when we speak of 
reason qua theoretical leading to science, we imply that 
we have got beyond what Leibniz called les consecutions 
des betes. Further if these two aspects of reason are 
not two kinds of reason but one, — since even at this 
level experience is still one, — it follows that the sup- 
posed deliverances of reason in the one case as in the 
other are amenable to logic and open to challenge. 
Logic can create nothing, but it is entitled to criticise 
all. Science, it is commonly assumed, has also the 
right to call faith to account. But the verdict of logic 
so far has always been : No case. Faith contradicts 
nothing that science is in a position to affirm, and 
asserts nothing that science is in a position to deny. 
Science cannot disclaim it as error, nor can it appeal to 
science as truth. But what science can neither posi- 
tively affirm nor positively deny may still count for 

w. 27 



41 8 Faith and Knowledge 

something as being more or less probable ; and ' proba- 
bilities are the guide of life.' In this sense the theist 
has been said to walk by faith not by sight : he is not 
sure, it is said, but he hopes for the best and acts 
accordingly. Religious apologists sometimes argue on 
these lines — Pascal, Butler and Paley, for example — 
but the prudence thus advocated is not faith ; and 
assuredly it is not religion. Its effect on the indi- 
vidual's conduct, if he gets no further, will be pro- 
portional to his estimate of the probability of what 
still remains uncertain. We are then here still in the 
region of knowledge widely understood. Such prudence 
may be reasonable, but we must ascend to something 
more systematic before we are entitled to talk of 
practical reason and rational faith. This ascent 
philosophy should enable us to make and, if needs be, 
to criticise. Though the attempt to deal with theism 
from the standpoint of science is really an ignoratio 
elenchi, this cannot be said of philosophy, at least not 
till positivism and agnosticism are triumphant. That, 
we may content ourselves meanwhile in saying, they are 
never likely to be 1 . 

Let us now briefly recall the main steps by which, 
starting from the pluralistic standpoint, we have ad- 
vanced to the theistic position ; and see whether, even 
admitting that it is not a theoretical but a practical 
position, it is none the less deserving of the title 
rational, neither transcending the domain of reason nor 
falling short of it. But a word first as to what in this 
connexion we are to understand by reason. Reason is 
concerned with the world in its totality either as being 
1 Cf. J. Seth, A Study of Ethical Principles, ist edn, pp. 393 ff. 






Faith and Reason 419 

a system or as having a meaning : we may ask What is 
it? and also What is it for or why is it? The two 
questions are intimately connected. From the theoretical 
standpoint we do not inquire about the ' why ' till we 
know something of the 'what.' But, as I have had 
already to insist, the standpoint of theory is not the 
standpoint of life. Life is primarily active, not con- 
templative ; and thus it is only while striving for what is 
good that we learn what is true ; only as interested in 
the 'what for' that we inquire about the ' what.' Even 
in common language to ask ' why ' is to ask for ' the 
reason,' — that is not merely for the cause but chiefly 
for the end. It is with reason in this sense that we 
have now to deal. 

There are those who say that to talk of the world as 
having a meaning or end at all is an unwarrantable 
assumption. This may be true as an abstract state- 
ment, that is so long as we separate structure and 
description from purpose and worth. And for science 
it is important to keep the two distinct : hence Bacon's 
depreciation of teleology, and hence too Kant's treat- 
ment of the category of End — unlike those of Substance 
and Cause — as only regulative and not constitutive. 
But can those who without reservation refuse to credit 
the world with a meaning give a reason for their 
position, and so justify themselves in stigmatizing as 
dogmatic or superstitious those who are not thus 
sceptical ? If the world has no meaning, must we not 
say that it is an irrational world ? But we are ourselves 
the highest beings in it of whom we have any direct 
objective knowledge. Unless then we are to stultify 
ourselves, all that we can mean in calling the world 

27 — 2 



420 Faith and Knowledge 

irrational is that it would be so apart from its relation 
to ourselves and other rational beings. It is but an 
awkward way of saying what Hamilton preferred to 
put more grandiloquently : " On earth, there is nothing 
great but man ; in man, there is nothing great but 
mind." We may call it faith, but we cannot call it 
irrational, to believe that the world has a meaning and 
a meaning for us. 

But even granting that the world has a meaning, it 
is contended in the next place that since for us this 
meaning is not here and now realised, we do not 
certainly know what it is. We would fain, it may be, 
mould the world nearer to our heart's desire, but we 
cannot, it has been said, ' argue from the reality of 
desires to the truth of dogmas.' A good deal depends 
surely upon the rationality of the desires. This is the 
next point — have we ourselves any supremely rational 
aim ? Till we have, we cannot claim to have emerged 
from the tutelage of nature, to be ourselves rational 
and free. 

In discussing this point it is enough to appeal to 
humanity at its present highest level. The best of men 
certainly recognise a moral ideal with which they 
identify their own highest good, and whose imperatives 
they therefore regard as absolutely binding and yet — 
because self-imposed — as also absolutely free. Now 
the moral ideal places the highest good of each in the 
highest good of all ; but for us it is only an ideal. But 
will any one say that it is irrational ? Happily, as it is, 
history furnishes us with many and striking instances of 
brotherly love and heroic devotion, and there is more 
zeal now than ever to promote goodwill among men : 



The Meaning of the World 42 1 

does any one call these absurd or think the onward 
course of philanthropy and self-consecration to the 
public weal should be stayed ? We will not pause to 
remark how much more the moral ideal involves than 
these ideas of themselves suggest ; for already at this 
stage we shall be met by the objection, that man being 
what he is and the world what it is, the realisation of 
even this much of our ideal is impossible. And if man 
stands alone and if this life is all, the objection is hardly 
to be gainsaid. But then we are confronted by a 
serious dilemma. Either the world is not rational or 
man does not stand alone and this life is not all. But 
it cannot be rational to conclude that the world is not 
rational, least of all when an alternative is open to us 
that leaves room for its rationality — the alternative of 
postulating God and a future life. 

Without the idea of a Supreme and Ultimate 
Being, least inadequately conceived as personal, tran- 
scending the world, as the ground of its being, and yet 
immanent in it, as it is his idea — the world may well 
for ever remain that rerum concordia dzscors, which at 
present we find it. Ever since man attained to self- 
consciousness and reason he has had ideals and will 
always have them ; and his ideals are the measure of 
his worth and the sure marks of his true progress or 
decline. But if we are to stop short with the pluralism 
which is all that in fact we find, where all are essentially 
finite as well as interdependent, how do we know that 
there will not always be incompatible ideals, ideals 
therefore always imperfect ? Perfectly to harmonize 
egoism and altruism, for example, has always been the 
great crux for moralists. A recent French moralist 



422 Faith and Knowledge 

who disclaimed the theistic belief has argued with some 
force that a complete solution is in the nature of things 
impossible 1 ; and a distinguished English moralist, as 
we know, without clearly committing himself as regards 
the theistic ' hypothesis,' concluded his work by saying: 
"If we reject this belief, the Cosmos of Duty is really 
reduced to a Chaos ; and the prolonged effort of the 
human intellect to frame a perfect ideal of rational 
conduct is seen to have been foredoomed to inevitable 
failure 2 ." We may accept his conclusion, though we 
can, I think, improve upon his reasons. It is not as 
providing adequate sanctions for the suppression of 
egoism — effectual it may be but scarcely moral — that 
theism provides the keystone to the structure of ethics. 
Over against other men a man may possibly be in- 
corrigibly selfish, but with living faith in God selfishness 
towards him would not be possible. To any other 
being I may decline to say, Thy will not mine be done, 
but not to God, if I believe in him. The idea of this 
one divine Will necessarily implies the meaning of the 
world ; for that is grounded entirely on it. It also implies 
the presence of a definite moral ideal as an eternal pur- 
pose, which finite wills alone might strain after for ever 
and never realise. With one creative Spirit over all we 
may well believe in a unity of the many created spirits, 
such that the highest good of all will prove to be the 
highest good of each. And in the light of this divine 
purpose we may well find the vocation and the meaning 
of our own individual life. The existence of this 

1 L. Bourdeau, Le Probleme de la Vie. Essai de Sociologie generate, 
1901. 

2 H. Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 1st edn, 1874, p. 473. 



Necessity for Belief in God 423 

Creative Spirit is matter of faith not of knowledge, to 
be sure ; but may we not hold it to be a rational faith, 
since without it we are without assured hope in a world 
that is then without clear meaning? 

But not only is the idea of God a postulate of 
reason as practical : it is also a ' regulative idea ' for 
reason as theoretical. It has been the predominant 
tendency of theoretical speculation in fact to lay undue 
stress, if I may so say, on this idea; and so to render it 
completely indeterminate by denying not the existence 
of God but the reality of the world : not atheism, the 
doctrine that there is no God, but acosmism, the 
doctrine that there is no world, has been the usual 
outcome of so-called pure thought. Still we have found 
that mere pluralism, which begins with the world and 
proceeds in a more empirical fashion, has to content 
itself by accepting the undeniable unity, which the very 
idea of a world implies, as something ultimate which it 
can neither explain nor show to be self-explanatory. 
The theoretical demand for the ground of the world 
then, as well as the practical demand for the good of 
the world, is met by the idea of God. In this sense 
the words of Wundt are true : " Philosophy can prove 
the necessity of faith, but to convert it into knowledge, 
for that she has not the power 1 ." Conviction here can 
come only by living, not by merely thinking: " If any 
man willeth to do his will he shall know of the doctrine 
whether it be of God." 

It will be opportune at this point to notice a difficulty 
sometimes raised. If there verily is a God and a 
future life, surely facts of such moment would have been 
1 System der Philosophies iste Auf. 4ter A bschnitt, fin. p. 444. 



424 Faith and Knowledge 

placed beyond question and not left where, if there is 
room for faith, there must also be room for doubt as 
well. This is but a special form of the objection that 
may be made to an evolving world as such, to a world 
that temporarily is not, but only gradually becomes, 
what its ideal implies, a world that, so to say, makes 
itself instead of being posited ready-made. Tran- 
scendent objections of this sort we cannot, I believe, 
reasonably raise or profitably discuss. If we could 
intuite this world sub specie aeternitatis the objection 
would lapse ; so long and so far as we have to live in 
it sub specie temporis, the objection is self-contradictory. 
The most we can do is to find fault with the mode or 
the pace of this world's actual evolution. But even so, 
the fact that knowledge has to grow from more to 
more — cannot be passively imparted but must be 
actively acquired — is so fundamental and universal a 
characteristic of our evolution, that it is very doubtful 
if we can form any clear concept of an experience that 
develops at all developing on other lines. In particular 
the idea of God — like other 'ideas of reason' — obviously 
could not be revealed to minds unfitted to assimilate 
it ; and yet could not fail to be acquired by those that 
were. The history of philosophy and religion shows 
us accordingly the gradual emergence of this idea, 
crude at first, but progressively elaborated, both for 
theory and for life, as the mind of man grew in in- 
telligence and insight, and his heart in purity and 
singleness of aim. If the slowness of this progress 
depress us — as well it may — still we have to remember 
that, inasmuch as we are free agents, this progress 
must depend on our own lives and efforts. But there 



Belief in a Future Life 425 

is one doctrine of the theology in vogue which gives 
special point to the objection we have considered 1 — 
the doctrine viz. that those who die outside the pale 
of Christianity are ' lost eternally.' This c moral enor- 
mity,' as Mill called it, at any rate rational theism 
must disavow. Texts in support of such a doctrine 
may be cited no doubt — but Christianity is a bigger 
thing than texts, and happily the spirit of Christianity 
is clearly against it, as Christians themselves are coming 
more and more to see. 

Our moral ideals lead not only to faith in God, but 
also, supported by this faith, to belief in a future life. 
The question of the rationality of this belief depends, 
we have allowed, on the value we are entitled to assign 
to man and to his work. The mere wish to live longer 
is no reason for believing that we shall live again ; 
while a claim to live again based on personal merit 
seems more arrogant than rational. This is true but 
scarcely relevant. It is not a question of private 
wishes or of extraneous rewards : it is a question of 
the status of a rational free agent who has chosen or 
is capable of choosing the moral ideal as his end. 
The ideal is there and is to be realised : it is rational 
to believe this and all that it implies, if it is rational 
to believe anything. One thing that it implies in an 
evolving world like ours is a gradual advance from the 
status quo of humanity, whereon the ideal has dawned, 
ever forwards unto the perfect day. Humanity already 
has yearnings and aspirations that the flesh-pots of 
Egypt — material and temporal well-being — can never 
content ; is it, impelled by these longings for higher 

1 Cf. J. S. Mill, Three Essays on Religion, 1885, pp. 114 f. 



426 Faith and Knowledge 

things, destined to wander aimlessly in the wilderness 
for ever unsatisfied ? 

Well, at all events, it may be said, we see other 
creatures remaining apparently stationary at lower 
stages of development which man has already left 
behind ; and is it not then likely that, in turn, other 
rationals, more highly endowed and better placed than 
we, may realise the ideals which but a few men among 
all mankind imperfectly surmise and fitfully long for ? 
We can worship where we cannot emulate, just as 
a dog worships his master and is the better for it, 
though he will never become a man. It is better 
that we should ' pitch our behaviour low, our projects 
high,' and die outright as philosophers unsatisfied, 
rather than live while we live as brutes in whom the 
light of reason has never shone. Better assuredly, but 
still assuredly not good. Nor is the analogy on which 
this counsel of renunciation rests altogether a sound 
one. It is true that diversity of endowment is an 
ultimate characteristic of our world. As St Paul put 
it: — "All flesh is not the same flesh.... There is one 
glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another 
glory of the stars." What advance is possible within 
each kind we cannot tell. But at least advance seems 
possible so long as an ideal, more or less consciously 
recognised or felt, incites to efforts towards its attain- 
ment. This is life in the fullest sense, and this too is 
faith in the widest sense: so lange man strebt, glaubt 
man, unci so lange man glaubt, strebt man 1 . The lower 
animals seem in general content with their lot : they 
struggle to exist rather than to advance, and so we 
1 Chalybaus, Speculative Philosophic von Katit bis Hegel, i860, concl. 



Counter-arguments 42 7 

may describe theirs as a stationary state; they seem to 
have attained to an equilibration with their present 
conditions. This is emphatically not the case with 
man — he always has ideals — and so far the analogy 
just now appealed to as a ground for resignation, fails 
in the essential point. 

Yes, the positivists will say, we believe that humanity 
in the distant future will realise our ideal ; but what 
we know of evolution leads us to suppose our relation 
to this consummation to be that of forerunners and 
harbingers of the good which posterity is to have and 
to hold. As the extinct anthropoids stand to us, so 
we stand to the over-man who is to succeed us ; 

For all we thought and loved and did, 
And hoped and suffer'd, is but seed 
Of what in them is flower and fruit. 

We remain without the promised land, but we do not 
wander aimlessly in the wilderness : we know what we 
work for and we work unselfishly : when our work is 
done, we should be content to depart in peace. In 
evolution there is an order of generations as well as an 
order of kinds, and it is as unreasonable to repine 
because we are not angels, as to complain because a 
better time is coming that we shall not see. After all 
ours is better than those which went before ; and so it 
may always be ; for there is really no finality. Those 
who realise one ideal will find another beckoning them 
onwards, which they in turn will strive after but not 
attain : 

Hope springs eternal in the human breast, 
Man never is, but always to be blest. 

Forcible as such reasoning may seem from its own 



428 Faith and Knowledge 

standpoint of thorough-going relativity, it is essentially- 
incoherent and irrational. It does not descend deep 
enough to see the full meaning of personality nor rise 
high enough to come in sight of what is meant by the 
Supreme Good. It moves entirely on the naturalistic 
plane, where there are no causes that are not in turn 
effects and no ends that are not in turn means — in a 
word no autonomous beings, who initiate their own 
actions and are ends in themselves. A realm of such 
ends, as ideally at least an absolute unity, implies one 
Supreme End for the whole and for each of its members, 
the precise opposite of what a system of means implies, 
where both the whole and the parts alike lack any end 
of their own at all 1 . The wearisome procession of 
generation after generation of mortals in pursuit of an 
ignis fatuus, all hoping, all working for what none 
attain, might divert a Mephistopheles but would cer- 
tainly not be a realm of ends. 

Again in appealing to evolution the naturalistic 
theory of progress overlooks the one point in which 
the moral differs from the natural. Natural evolution 
is concerned primarily with the type, moral with the 
single life. Neither heredity nor natural selection nor 
even tradition can take the place of personal election. 
Apart from this, though we follow the stream of tendency 
that makes for righteousness, we cannot claim to be 
1 unselfish or to know what we are striving for.' Further 
the realisation of the moral ideal is not a process, like 
the development of a language or an art, that can 
accomplish itself piecemeal through the instrumen- 
tality of successive generations, acting more or less 

1 Cf. Lecture xvm. p. 387. 



The Moral Ideal and Faith 429 

unconsciously and without set purpose. From first to 
last faith in this ideal is a personal thing ; in personal 
conviction and choice it must begin, whether the person 
is born early or born late. Is it then rational to suppose 
that in the one case he cannot achieve it at all, and in 
the other has it thrust upon him ? But it is certain, if 
this life is all, that complete attainment is impossible ; 
for as the dissolution of the organism will then ex- 
tinguish the individual, so the dissolution of the solar 
system will extinguish the race. Hence the moral 
ideal, as it leads to faith in God, leads also to the belief 
that the spirit world has other dimensions than those 
of the time and space that encompass the world of 
phenomena. For what is the alternative ? When a 
man desiring to build a tower lays the foundation but 
is not able to finish he becomes a mockery and his 
work is called a ' folly.' And has not God been mocked 
and life called the vanity of vanities on the assumption 
that the present world is all ? But since faith in the 
unseen and eternal is open to us, is it not rational to 
embrace it, since there the essentially rational, the 
absolute Good is not merely a hope but reality ? And 
in the name of reason what else indeed can it be ? 



LECTURE XX. 

THE REALM OF ENDS. 

It only remains now in bringing these lectures to 
a close to summarize briefly the main course of our 
inquiry, to state as positively as may be the results 
that we seem to have attained and finally to glance at 
some topics for further reflexion which they suggest. 

At the outset we disavowed any attempt completely 
to solve the so-called riddle of the universe. This 
much modesty is common to all schools of philosophy 
alike in our day. The universe as a whole is but 
partially accessible to us at the best ; but we make up 
for this defect to some extent by viewing it from 
different standpoints. It is therefore important first 
of all, if we can, to ascertain which of these is the 
most fundamental and to orientate the rest to this. 
One characteristic belongs to them all — that duality of 
subject and object that enters into all experience. But 
the subject's attitude towards the object is twofold : it 
is both cognitive and conative, or, as we often say ? 
both theoretical and practical. Though these subjective 
attitudes are not strictly separable, yet the practical 
terminates in the theoretical so soon and so far as what 
we immediately want is only to know. And so it 
comes about that, ignoring the subject and its practical 



Natural Philosophy and Ethics 431 

relations, forgetting even what knowledge implies (as 
we forget the eye when intent only on what we see), 
we are led to conceive the universe as in itself only 
objective. From this standpoint we call it Nature, 
and we ask simply what is it : the one problem here 
is to find a precise and comprehensive description ; 
and the result is what Newton called Natural Philo- 
sophy. No complementary abstraction is possible when 
we turn to the subjective factor of experience : we may 
here misinterpret the objective but we cannot leave it 
out of account. It pains or pleases, helps or hinders 
us : in interaction with it our life primarily consists, 
and we are forced therefore to try to understand 
it : so we ask what it means. From this standpoint 
Spinoza's Ethics may be regarded as the pendant to 
the work of his contemporary Newton. " All individual 
things " said Spinoza " are animated, albeit in divers 
degrees," and again "every thing has in itself a striving 
to preserve its own condition and to improve itself 1 ." 
This is at all events the more primitive view : is it 
also the more fundamental ? We conclude that it is, 
first, because it takes account of both the factors of 
experience; and secondly, because, while it is impossible 
from the standpoint of Nature to reach Spirit, it is 
only from the standpoint of Spirit that Nature can be 
understood : in a word we take the universe to be 
spiritual — a realm of ends. 

But what is its constitution ? For even from the 
standpoint of Spirit it is possible to regard the universe 
in two aspects : it is One and it is Many. The Many 

1 Ethics, 11. xiii. Schol., Short Treatise on God, Man and his 
Wellbeing, bk i. ch. v. Wolf's edn, p. 46. 



43 2 The Realm of Ends 

are relative to each other : the whole is absolute. We 
are of the Many : with them we interact. It is with the 
plurality then rather than with the unity that man is first 
of all practically concerned. The unity of the world, 
as Kant has said, is an idea of our reason, not an 
object of our experience ; and it was not till man had 
lived long and thought deeply that this idea of the 
One or the Absolute first dawned. It is certain then 
that the pluralisms standpoint is the more primitive : is 
it also in itself the more fundamental ? We cannot say 
this, we can hardly even suppose it. Why then begin 
with it ? But have we any choice ? The attempt — to 
a speculative mind so attractive — to begin with the 
One has, we know, often been made, and surely we 
may add, has as often failed. Moreover when more 
closely examined these essays in pure thought turn 
out to be ' infected ' with the empirical. Like a rocket 
they dazzle in the void, but the stick can always be 
found which directed their course and betrays their 
origin. Nevertheless this tell-tale stick is not only 
dropped but forgotten, and the pluralistic aspect of the 
universe not explained but explained away. If the 
speculative enterprises of the past can be any guide 
for the future, they show that we have no choice but 
to begin where we are, and that we only deceive 
ourselves when we try to start by transcending ex- 
perience. Accepting this teaching of history then, we 
began our inquiry about the universe as a realm of 
ends from the pluralistic standpoint. 

We began, that is to say, with ' individuals animated 
in various degrees and striving for self-preservation or 
betterment' But with what do they strive ? With 



The Start from the Pluralistic Standpoint 433 

others who either actively compete with them or at 
least stand in their way.- And also, we should have to 
add, with their physical environment ; were it not that 
pluralism, in regarding every 'thing' as in some degree 
animated, does away with the distinction between 
persons, widely understood, and inert things altogether. 
In support of this bold assumption an appeal is made 
to the principle of continuity, confirmed as it is by the 
fact that every advance of knowledge so far has only 
disclosed simpler forms of life and further analogies 
between the organic and what we call the inorganic. 
It is also contended that there is no evidence that any 
two beings in the world are exactly alike ; which is 
just what selfhood or personality implies, and the 
physicist's concept of atoms denies. Again the constants 
and uniformities, with which his analysis ends, are 
regarded as simply statistical results, such as frequently 
hide the diversity and spontaneity of animated beings 
when they and their actions are taken en masse. This 
diversity and spontaneity are held to be fundamental ; 
and the orderliness and regularity we now observe, to 
be the result of conduct, not its presupposition. We 
are supposed to be dealing, not with a system of 
concepts which can be unfolded deductively, but with 
concrete agents whose intercourse and development 
can only be studied historically. On the one side we 
have what is done, ideals realised ; on the other what 
is still to do, ideals still to be realised : or adopting 
scholastic terms, we have natura naturata and natura 
naturans. The idea of the good is the master clue; 
for this is what all striving and all ideals imply. The 
process throughout is that of trial and error, which all 
w. 28 



434 The Realm of Ends 

experience involves ; but there is no pure chance and 
no utter chaos. Contingency however is inevitable ; 
we find it accordingly on every hand, not only in 
human affairs or in animated nature but in the so-called 
physical world as well. 

Still through all a steady tendency is apparent to 
replace this mere contingency by a definite progression ; 
the further we advance the more we see of guidance 
and direction. With this progression we are familiar 
under the name of evolution, a term too firmly estab- 
lished to be lightly set aside. It is all the more 
important therefore to bear in mind that — though he 
continues to use the word — what the pluralist under- 
stands by it is something widely different from that 
explicating of what is implicit from the first, which is 
the literal meaning of evolution, and the meaning that 
it still holds when the universe is primarily contemplated 
from the standpoint of the One. But the pluralistic 
meaning is more accurately expressed by the rival 
term ' epigenesis ' ; that is to say, the origination by 
integration of new properties in the whole, which its 
constituents in their isolation did not possess. Such 
integration has been called ' creative synthesis ' : a 
melody compared with its component notes or a regi- 
ment with its soldiers as disbanded may serve as 
instances. Such syntheses arise wherever there are 
active individuals bent on working out a modus vivendi 
with each other ; as we see most conspicuously in the 
development of society. What is thus created are not 
new entities but new values ; and these tend not only 
to be conserved but to make higher unities and worthier 
ideals possible ; and that without assignable limits. 



Is the Phiralistic Standpoint final ? 435 

Moreover, when at length the level of human culture 
is attained, we reach a good that is not diminished by 
being shared, and one that yields more the more it has 
already yielded. And here — in form at any rate — the 
final goal of evolution comes into sight, not a pre- 
established harmony but the eventual consummation of 
a perfect commonwealth, wherein all cooperate and 
none conflict, wherein the many have become one, one 
realm of ends. 

With the Many pluralism began, with the Many it 
ends. But did it really begin at the beginning and 
does it really reach the end ? Is the pluralistic stand- 
point absolute ? This is the question to which at this 
point we returned. But if we had to begin as we did, 
this question really converts itself into one concerning 
what I called the upper and the lower limits of pluralism. 
Does pluralism naturally suggest some end beyond 
itself, and presuppose something as the ground of itself ? 
The problems of the universe would be fewer as well 
as simpler if all the life in it were confined to this 
planet ; so much so that we find philosophers and 
theologians again and again attempting to prove that 
this is in truth the case, as mankind for ages had been 
wont to suppose. But the ignorance and special pleading 
common to all these attempts justify us nevertheless in 
ignoring them. If then we regard the universe as 
teeming with living orbs, how are we to imagine these 
as ever constituting the commonwealth of worlds : in 
view of our own utter isolation how is this higher unity 
ever to be achieved ? Such questions lead the pluralist 
to apply the principle of continuity upwards as well 
as downwards. To connect these otherwise isolated 

28—2 



436 The Realm of Ends 

worlds he is driven to assume a hierarchy of intelligences 
of a higher order, and so is led on to conceive a 
Highest of all. But still, so long as we hold to the 
principle of continuity, this Supreme Being will only 
be primus inter pares, only one of the Many ; he will 
also, like the rest, be confronted and conditioned by 
others, so long at least as we hold to the historical 
standpoint. Thus while pluralism suggests a tran- 
scendent upper limit, it is one to which knowledge 
cannot actually attain. Again the principle of continuity 
and the historical method, the standpoint that is to 
say of evolution, suggest also a lower limit, and this 
proves to be equally unattainable. In attempting to 
regress to an absolute origin, we seem only to get 
nearer to the utterly indeterminate that affords no 
ground for distinct individuals at all ; where there is 
no natura naturata, and where in order that the nasci 
may begin, we seem to require a transcendent Prime 
Mover standing apart from the nascent Many. May 
not the two limits, then, which its cardinal principles 
of continuity and evolution do not enable pluralism to 
attain, be really related ? This question leads us to 
the idea of creation, and so to the discussion of Theism. 
Not content with the admission that pluralism on 
examination points both theoretically and practically 
beyond itself, many advocates of singularism have 
attempted to show it up as radically absurd. These 
attempts do not appear successful. That an absolute 
totality of individuals is self-contradictory and that an 
absolute individual is not, is more than anyone has yet 
proved. That a plurality of individuals in isolation 
should ever come into relation is inconceivable indeed. 



The Idea of Creation 437 

but only because a plurality without unity is itself 
inconceivable. That individuals severally distinct as 
regards their existence could not interact is however 
a mere dictum. Pluralism takes the world as we find 
it, as a plurality of individuals unified in and through 
their mutual intercourse. ' Radically empirical ' this 
certainly is, but if it be true, it cannot be radically 
absurd ; and if it be not true, then we are entitled to 
ask the singularist how he ever got started on the 
a priori road. We approach theism then as promising 
to complete pluralism, not as threatening to abolish it, 
as providing theoretically more unity in the ground of 
the world, and practically a higher and fuller unity in 
its meaning and end. 

Starting from the Many as real we can never reach 
an Absolute into which they are absorbed and vanish : 
they are our ratio cognoscendi of God as their ratio 
essendi. As related to them, God must be limited and 
determined by them : he cannot be as if they were not. 
If then he is not to be merely one of them, not merely 
primus inter pares, this limitation must be an internal 
limitation ; God, we must say, is their Creator ; and in 
creating them he has determined himself. And by this 
the pluralist means even more than at first it seems 
to mean. Theists in our day profess to accept the 
evolution hypothesis, but hardly as pluralism interprets 
it, not as epigenesis or creative synthesis but rather as 
the literal unfolding of a plan completely specified in 
every detail. " Unless creators are created, nothing is 
really created " the pluralist maintains, and the idea of 
creation would never enter our minds at all. 

At this point we have the remarkable conjunction 



438 The Realm of Ends 

of naturalism and orthodox theology in opposition to 
pluralism — Hobbes and Jonathan Edwards in league 
against the 'personal idealist.' Careful analysis, we 
thought, enabled us to make good distinctions that the 
determinist either overlooks or denies — the distinction, 
for example, between self-determination, implying teleo- 
logical categories, and determination according to fixed 
law, implying only mechanical categories ; and again the 
Kantian distinction between the efficient causality of 
the thing per se and the schematized causation according 
to 'a rule of succession,' to which the thing per se may 
give rise but which never could give rise to it ; the 
distinction, that is, between the pattern of filled time 
and the agents who do the filling. But if we could 
start, not from these agents, the Many, but from the 
One conceived as absolute, the necessitarian position 
would be unavoidable and the predestinarian right. 
But then, as we have all along maintained, the world, 
as we know it, would be impossible. The only way 
out of this impasse — not between pluralism and theism, 
mind, but between theism and atheism — appears to be 
the via media, that "all is not decreed, that the total 
possibilities, however far back we go, are fixed ; but 
within these however far forward we go, contingencies 
are open 1 ." This way alone seems to lead towards 
the solution of another problem, the gravest that 
theism has to face — the problem of evil. 

From the standpoint of the Many, evils are hard 
to bear but easy enough to account for, but from the 
standpoint of the One, evil seems to be simply a con- 
tradiction, an impossibility. If theism be true, then 
1 Lecture xiv. p. 315. 



The Problem of Evil 439 

evil can only be relative and must gradually disappear : 
if theism be not true, though evils remain relative, they 
may never disappear. In any case, evil as absolute, as 
a principle, is an absurdity — this the speculations of 
pessimists sufficiently show. " God can do no evil, it is 
agreed ; if then this world were verily his creation, 
there could not be any, even relative, evil in it." This 
conclusion forms the major premise of the prosecution 
in the great theodicy, as Leibniz called it. Once again 
we may say the main issue is between theism and 
atheism ; and since the fact of relative evils is indispu- 
table, the verdict must be for atheism, if this conclusion 
is sound. For if the world as it is be as God decreed 
it, the moral evil in it would be his work. But if our 
contention will hold, that though God created us, he 
created us free and to be co-workers with himself, 
then this moral evil, which proximately at all events is 
our doing, will be really and ultimately ours. If how- 
ever our contention is not sound, then the whole case, 
prosecution and defence alike, is either an illusion and 
a farce, or there is no God at all. 

Still, granting this contention meanwhile, what of 
those physical evils which do not seem to be either 
proximately or remotely attributable to us? But first, 
there is one restriction that the idea of any determinate 
world, no matter what, imposes upon itself in being 
determinate — its parts must be compossible : nothing in 
it can do everything. The idea of a world the parts of 
which are in no way to limit each other is as unthink- 
able as the idea of an absolutely omnipotent God who 
is to create it. To object that God himself can only 
be finite, and must be limited from without, because he 



44-0 The Realm of Ends 

cannot override eternal truths, is the merest sophistry. 
The demand for absoluteness of this sort is a demand 
not for God but for the Indeterminate, a supreme 
unity of opposites which is the same as nothing. 
Leaving aside such so-called physical evils as are in 
this sense metaphysical, the negations which all de- 
termination involves, we can fairly ask concerning the 
physical ills that are admittedly contingent, whether we 
have in general any reason to suppose that they are 
superfluous and not rather the indispensable condition 
of advance, and so as an incentive really good. The 
world, ever pressing forward, entered on the stage of 
conscious life as soon as it was possible, not waiting till 
the fierce strife and turmoil of what we call the elements 
had wholly abated, but rather driven by struggling 
with these to new adaptations that tended to raise it 
above them. At this stage such incentives were largely 
of the nature of a vis a tergo : only as the advance has 
proceeded, have these given place to motives which 
partake more and more of the nature of a vis a fronte. 
The pressure of physical evils having first led to the 
solidarity of the social state, this has ushered in the 
attraction of those ideals that Hegel called the objective 
spirit. 

It is characteristic of man that he stands at the 
parting of the ways ; and under the influence of both 
physical ills and spiritual ideals, is led eventually to 
conclude that he has no abiding city here and to seek 
a city yet to come. Meanwhile the dimensions that 
circumscribe this spatial and temporal world afford us 
no sure clue to the wider dimensions of that more spiri- 
tual world beyond ; nor do they enable us to conjecture 



The Two Voices — Faith and Knowledge 441 

how the two are connected or how the transition 
is to be made. But none the less our hold on those 
higher spiritual ideals leads us to believe in God and 
forces us to think we were not made to die. But any- 
how, it is urged, all that we are sure of are the ills and 
the vanities of the present ; and if we must infer from 
the known to the unknown, is it not more likely that 
death will end them than that it will mend them ? 
That present evil should set us hoping for future good 
is natural, but to argue from evil now to good hereafter 
is surely not rational. No, it is replied, vanity and 
vexation of spirit are not all that we find. Thoughtful 
men have been driven to call life an enigma but few 
have been willing to curse it as a folly or a fraud ; it 
has too much meaning, shows too much purpose for 
that, though its secret and its goal be not yet clear. 
Mists may envelope us, mountains seem to bar our 
way ; but often we have heard when we could not see, 
and found a way by pressing forward, though, while we 
halted, there seemed no way at all. These are the two 
voices — faith and knowledge — how come they to put 
such different interpretations on the very same facts ? 
Because knowledge is of things we see, and seeks to 
interpret the world as if they were the whole ; while 
faith is aware that now we see but in part, and con- 
vinced that only provided the unseen satisfies our 
spiritual yearnings is the part we see intelligible — 
that which ought to be being the key to that 
which is. 

And now to state succinctly the positive results we 
seem to have attained. They may be gathered up 
under four heads relating to Method or standpoint, to 



44 2 The Realm of Ends 

God or the One, to the World or the Many, and to 
Faith in the Unseen. 

I. As to method — we have started from what we 
are, cognitive and conative subjects ; and from where we 
are — so to say in mediis rebus — in a world consisting to 
an indefinite extent of other like subjects. No specula- 
tion, no dialectic, no ontological deduction, is needed to 
reach this position ; and without it all these alike are 
impossible. But beginning thus, we are led both on 
theoretical and on practical grounds to conceive a more 
fundamental standpoint than this of the Many, namely 
that of the One that would furnish an ontological 
unity for their cosmological unity and ensure a teleo- 
logical unity for their varied ends, in being — as it has 
been said — 'the impersonated Ideal of every mind 1 ' — 
the One, as ultimate source of their being and ultimate 
end of their ends. But though we can conceive this 
standpoint, we cannot here attain to it or see the 
world from it. It is there, like their centre of gravity 
for the inhabitants of a planetary ring, but the aspect 
of the world from thence is more than we can conceive. 
Attempts to delineate this have been really but pro- 
jections of our own eccentric and discursive views : 
creative synthesis as human implies aspects, creative 
intuition as divine is beyond them. The result of all 
attempts to begin with the One is only to lower our 
idea of the world, not to raise our idea of God. His 
modus operandi, if even this phase is allowable, in 
creating, conserving, and ruling the world is beyond us. 

II. As to God from the point of view of man, 
then, we can only regard him as Spirit, as possessing 

1 Howison, Limits of Evolution, 2nd edn, p. xiv. 



God 443 

intelligence and will, and so as personal. But while we 
must admit such attributes carried to their limit to be 
beyond us, we cannot regard God as absolute in such 
wise as to deprive ourselves of all personality or initia- 
tive. How God created the world, how the One is the 
ground of the Many, we admit we cannot tell ; but since 
it is from the Many as real that we start we are forced to 
say that creation implies limitation ; otherwise the world 
could be nothing. Such theism would be acosmism. 
But while we have to maintain that in determining the 
world — his world — God also determines himself, it would 
be absurd to suppose that in thus determining himself 
he, so to say, diminishes himself. Such determination 
may be negation, nay must be, to be real at all ; but it is 
not abnegation. God does not transform, differentiate 
or fractionate himself into the world, and so cease to 
be God. Such theism would only be pantheism, which 
is truly but atheism. But now, finally, if the world, 
though God's world, the expression and revelation of 
himself, is yet not God, if though he is immanent in 
it, he is also as its creator transcendent to it, surely 
the greater the world — the greater the freedom and 
capacity of his creatures — the greater still is he who 
created and sustains and somehow surely overrules it 
all. Oriental servility and a priori speculation have 
made God synonymous with an 'Infinite and Absolute' 
that leaves room for no other and can brook none. To 
express dissent from this view, the unfortunate term 
' finite God,' devised by those who uphold the view, has 
been accepted from them by its opponents. As used by 
the former, it implies and was meant to imply imperfec- 
tion aad dependence, to place God in line with the Many 



444 The Realm of Ends 

and to deny his transcendent supremacy. So under- 
stood a finite God is a contradiction, of course. But 
the term ' finite God/ as accepted by the latter, means 
for them all that God can mean, if God implies the 
world and is not God without it : it means a living 
God with a living world/ not a potter God with a 
world of illusory clay, not an inconceivable abstraction 
that is only infinite and absolute, because it is beyond 
everything and means nothing, an aireipoOeos as 
Thomas Davidson, I believe, called it. 

III. And now as to this living world, of which 
God is the ground, this realm of ends which he 
respects because it is his end — it is, we say, a world of 
self-determining, free, agents, severally intent on attain- 
ing more good or at least on retaining the good they 
^/ have. We note three main characteristics — contingency 
in part, stability in part and progress in part — all 
involved in experience as epigenetic. There is con- 
tingency, for a common modus vivendi is still to seek ; 
there is stability, for all effectual cooperation is con- 
served as good ; and there is progress, so long as the 
ills we have or the goods we know not of prompt to 
further efforts. But goods we know not of are ideal ; 
and ideal ends are only possible on the plane of rational 
life : the brutes at least leave well alone, and species as 
soon as they are adjusted to their environment remain 
stationary, so long at least as that remains unchanged. 
Such a stationary state may be possible where progress 
is due solely to the vis a tergo of actual physical ills; it 
is impossible, even though these should cease, once the 
Good as an ideal has loomed in sight, and begun as 
a vis a /route to draw spirits onwards. But it has taken 



The World 445 

untold ages to accomplish that finite amount of progress 
which the pressure of material want promotes ; can we 
then expect the indefinite progress that spiritual possi- 
bilities open up will be easily or speedily achieved ? 
Compared with the interval between the lowest forms 
of merely animal life and the highest, the interval 
between civilised man and man in the infancy of the 
race, is vast ; and yet, so far as we can judge, the time 
it has occupied is correspondingly brief. The greater 
definiteness and steadiness of purpose that intelligence 
brings and the permanent tradition that social coope- 
ration makes possible have then unquestionably ac- 
celerated the rate of progress on the whole. 

But now struggles of a new order arise through 
this very progress itself. Moral evils spring up and 
grow apace in the rich soil of worldly prosperity ; for 
the intelligence and social continuity that make nobler 
ideals possible can also subserve the ends of selfishness, 
injustice and oppression. Thus the greatest enemy of 
mankind is man : so it has always been, so it may long 
continue to be. Yet here too there has been progress ; 
and the vision of a new era, when righteousness shall 
cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, evokes the 
lip-service of multitudes and the life-devotion of a few. 
But time, that tries all things, will assuredly bring more 
and more to take the lesson to heart that 

Man must pass from old to new, 
From vain to real, from mistake to fact, 
From what once seemed good to what now proves best. 

But why, we ask, must the lesson be so slowly learnt ? Be- 
cause to be effectually learnt, it must be learnt by heart, 
every jot and tittle of it by actual living experience. 



446 The Realm of Ends 

Advanced to the plane of social intercourse and ra- 
tional discourse, man has sought out many inventions, 
preferring at first what looks easy to what seems 
arduous, what looks near to what seems remote, what 
looks tangible to what seems visionary. This we call 
worldly wisdom. The more all its schemes are found 
to fail, the more clearly will stand out the one straight 
and narrow way — at first so hard to find and still 
so hard to ascend — that verily leads to life. As from 
geology we learn of species after species that have 
disappeared in the process of adjusting organism to 
environment ; so in history we learn from the rise and 
fall of empire after empire that only righteousness 
exalteth a nation and that those that pursue evil 
perish. It is thus in the light of evolution that the 
mystery of evil becomes clearest. God is the creator 
of the world, we say : his end can only be the Good — 
no other is even conceivable. But in a world created 
for the Good there can be no inherent, no ineradicable 
evil. The process of evolution must then in itself be 
good, the one way possible to actual good for creatures 
that are created to achieve it. And if again we ask 
why the way is so long and the progress so devious 
and so slow, we can but suppose it is so because only 
so can the progress be thorough and the way assuredly 
the best ; this we may well believe is why " the mills 
of God grind slowly and grind exceeding small." Only 
after proving all things can we hold fast to that which 
is good. 

But now — and this leads on to our last head — 
does this not come near to saying, it may be asked, 
that the best of all possible worlds is a world without 



God and the IVorld 447 

God ? is it not practically atheism, in short ? and if not 
that, still, if the world is left severely alone to work out 
its own salvation, what have we but the God-forsaken 
world in which the so-called deists are said to have 
believed ? Not atheism, certainly, for faith in God as 
the ground of the world affords us an assurance, which 
we could not otherwise have, that complete harmony 
and unity, the good of all in the good of each, is really 
attainable, nay, will verily be attained. Whereas, if 
we stop at a plurality of finite selves in interaction, we 
have no guarantee, cannot even reasonably expect, 
that such a totality will ever attain to perfect organic 
unity. Nor does the theism to which pluralism points 
leave no place for God in the world ; it is then not deism : 
creation, if we think, we shall see can be conceived only 
as continuous presence 1 . If God is the ground of the 
world at all he is its ground always as an active, living, 
interested, Spirit, not as a merely everlasting, change- 
less and indifferent centre, round which it simply whirls. 
Still God's action in the world must be for us as in- 
scrutable as his creation of it : indeed there is no 
reason why we should attempt to discriminate between 
them. In calling God transcendent we seek only to 
express that duality of subject and object which we 
take as fundamental to all spiritual being, not to 
suggest that his relation to the world must be thought 
under the category of external causation, like the 
interaction of object with object. This is obviously 
inadequate. Nor is the relation of God to the world 
comparable to the interaction of one finite subject 
with another ; for between them there is no such 
1 Cf. above, Lect. xn. pp. 260 f. 



448 The Realm of Ends 

dependence as that which connects them both with 
God. We trench upon the mystical when we attempt 
to picture this divine immanence, * closer to us than 
breathing and nearer than hands and feet.' It is this 
which stirs the ' cosmic emotion ' of poets like Words- 
worth, Goethe, Browning and Tennyson, to this that the 
inward witness of the spirit refers which is the essence 
of religious experience everywhere. In both there 
opens out in varying degrees of clearness and certainty 

The true world within the world we see, 
Whereof our world is but the bounding shore. 

This is the unseen world, the world not realised, in 
which faith moves. 

IV. In keeping with the great principle of continuity, 
everywhere displayed in the working out of the world's 
evolution, we have found this faith foreshadowed in the 
upward striving that is the essence of life. Consider 
for a moment the development of the senses. The 
first clear response is to mechanical contact, and we 
have as the first specific sense, the sense of touch. 
From this is presently differentiated the sense of 
hearing, when objects not yet present to actual touch 
give premonitions of their proximity by the vibrations 
they set up : hearing is thus the faith of touch. As 
hearing to touch so smell stands to taste : it is a 
foretaste that further extends the objective range. 
A freckle or pigment-spot is all that light at first 
produces ; but when its hints are heeded and the pig- 
mented retina that first arose is furnished by the 
organism's own prophetic efforts with directing muscles, 
it exchanges its passive sight for active vision, and 
opens out a vastly wider objective world. In keeping 



Faith 449 

with all this is the place of faith on the higher plane 
where it contrasts with intellectual sight : it is like a 
new sense that brings us face to face with an unseen 
world. What does this mean ? Let us go back a step. 
Here as everywhere — in its highest as in its lowest 
form — faith is striving and striving is faith. The whole 
conscious being is concerned : there is not merely the 
cognition of what is, there is also an appreciation of 
what it is worth, a sense of the promise and potency of 
further good that it may enfold ; there is a yearning to 
realise this ; and there is finally the active endeavour 
that such feeling prompts. It is through this faith that 
man is where he is to-day, through it that mountains 
have been removed and the unattainable verily attained. 
More life and fuller achieved by much toil and struggle, 
an ascent to higher levels not movement along the line 
of least resistance — this is the one increasing purpose 
that we can so far discern, when we regard the world 
historically as a realm of ends in place of summarising 
it scientifically under a system of concepts. 

And how do we stand now ? That the present 
world and progress on the plane of the present world 
do not and never will meet our highest needs — about 
this there is little question. But where in what is, in 
what we have so far attained, can we discern those 
eternal values that point upwards and beyond this 
present world ? Surely in all that we find of the 
beautiful and sublime in this earth on which we dwell 
and the starry heavens above it ; in all that led men 
long ago to regard nature as a cosmos ; in all that is 
best and noblest in the annals of human life ; in these 
very needs themselves that the seen and temporal fail 

w. 29 



45° The Realm of Ends 

to meet ; and above all, in that nascent sense of the 
divine presence which constitutes the truly religious 
life, and converts faith into the substance of things 
hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. But now 
a third question at once suggests itself. Faith on the 
lower levels was justified by its results : can we here 
too apply this test of success or failure ? The founder 
of Christianity at any rate did not hesitate to appeal to 
it : — " Beware of false prophets. Ye shall know them 
by their fruits : do men gather grapes of thorns or figs 
of thistles ? " And, in fact, this is the test that is and 
will be applied ; for, as I have already said, however 
much in theory men consider premisses, in practice they 
consider only results. 

A powerful practical argument in favour of re- 
ligious faith might be worked out on the following 
lines : — first we might point to its universality : no 
race of mankind is wholly without that feeling of 
dependence on the supernatural and mysterious, which, 
as Schleiermacher thought, is the common characteristic 
pf religious emotion. Next we might point to its 
survival', no race has yet outgrown it. There have 
been periods of religious decline, no doubt ; but they 
have sooner or later involved moral and intellectual de- 
cadence as well. And in these days when faith is said 
to be waning, we find that "things are in the saddle 
and ride mankind," and whither that tends history has 
made only too clear. Hitherto — in keeping with the 
judgment by results — such times have been followed 
by periods of revival and awakening ; and there are 
happily signs of such in our own day. Lastly we 
might point to the advance of religion that has usually 



Nietzsche 45 1 

accompanied the increase of morality and intelligence ; 
nay we might show that religion has largely furthered 
such advance. And here by way of contrast I may 
refer briefly to a strange prophet, whose writings are 
at this moment exciting the keenest attention — I refer 
to Nietzsche. As the struggle for existence and the 
survival of the fittest have brought man to the highest 
place as the paragon of animals, so in time they will 
lead, he teaches, to a yet higher being, the Uebermensch 
or Over-man. But this higher man, he foretells, will 
reject the existing morality of liberty, equality and 
fraternity, founded on the golden rule of benevolence 
and brotherly love — the morality of slaves as he con- 
temptuously names it. The new morality will be the 
morality of heroes, that is egoists : might will be right. 
As man now subjugates the lower animals to his own 
ends, so the Over-man will exploit feebler men and 
— as it has been sarcastically put — rise on stepping 
stones of their dead selves to higher things. In short 
a race is to appear, so Nietzsche and others would 
have us believe, that is to try the experiment of life 
wholly on the lines of what is called ' modern thought ' 
and wholly without faith in God or a world to come. 
I do not think the growing Nietzsche cult will last 
long or in the end do harm. If the terrible experiment 
must be made we may safely anticipate the result : it 
will be Hobbes's state of nature over again ; till the 
world retraces its steps. 

It will be said, perhaps : — ' The regenerate Christian 
is already an Uebermensch, no longer "natural man," 
but " spiritual" in the Pauline sense; nor is his ex- 
perience fairly described as subjective belief in God ; 

29 — 2 



452 The Realm of Ends 

it is actual love of God and conscious communion with 
him/ We have no right to question this ; though we 
must admit that such inward conviction of the reality 
of religious experience is, for the purposes of our 
discussion, to be classed as faith, not as knowledge, in 
so far as it is — epistemologically, though not psycho- 
logically — subjective, incommunicable, and objectively 
unverifiable. In so far, however, as he lets his light 
shine and men see his good works, the religious man 
affords practical evidence of the worth of his faith. 
With enough of such light, the justification of faith 
would be sure. 

One final question, among the many that suggest 
themselves, I must not wholly omit. We have been 
contemplating the universe as a realm of ends. If we 
were asked what is the end of this realm of ends we 
might answer rightly enough that its end can only be 
itself; for there is nothing beyond it, and no longer any 
meaning in beyond. It is the absolutely absolute. 
Still within it we have distinguished the One and the 
Many, and we have approached it from the standpoint 
of the latter. In so doing we are liable to a bias, so 
to say, in favour of the Many : led to the idea of God 
as ontologically and teleologically essential to their 
completion, we are apt to speak as if he were a 
means for them. Those who attempt to start from 
the standpoint of the One betray a bias towards the 
opposite extreme. The world, on their view, is for 
the glory of God : its ultimate raison d'etre is to be 
the means to this divine end. Can we not transcend 
these one-sided extremes and find some sublimer idea 
which shall unify them both ? We can indeed ; and 



The Absolute End 453 

that idea is Love. But here again we trench on the 
mystical, the ineffable, and can only speak in parables. 
Turning to Christianity as exhibiting this truth in the 
purest form we know, we find it has one great secret — 
dying to live, and one great mystery — the incarnation. 
The love of God in creating the world implies both. 
Leiblichkeit ist das Ende aller Wege Go ties, said an 
old German theologian. The world is God's self- 
limitation, self-renunciation might we venture to say ? 
And so God is love. And what must that world be 
that is worthy of such love ? The only worthy object 
of love is just love : it must then be a world that can 
love God. But love is free : in a ready-made world 
then it could have no place. Only as we learn to 
know God do we learn to love him : hence the long 
and painful discipline of evolution, with its dying to 
live — the converse process to incarnation — the putting 
off the earthly for the likeness of God. In such a 
realm of ends we trust " that God is love indeed, and 
love creation's final law." We cannot live or move 
without faith, that is clear. Is it not then rational. to 
believe in the best, we ask ; and can there be a better ? 



SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES. 

I. The Meaning of Contingency. (Lect. iv. p. 76.) 

While preparing these lectures for the press I have been 
asked by a friendly critic for a definition of contingency. 
Possibly the request was prompted by the conviction, com- 
monly enough entertained, that there is really no contingency 
in the world at all ; and this, it is supposed, any serious 
attempt to define contingency would sooner or later disclose. 
Absolute chance is certainly nonsense ; and relative chance, it 
may be said, is after all not really chance, and implies nothing 
but ignorance or — it may be — irrelevance to the matter in 
hand. The truth of this I have already fully admitted in the 
text ; but I have also distinguished between the contingency 
of chance and the contingency of freedom 1 . It is the latter 
contingency that is here in question, and, whatever may be 
said of its validity, its meaning at least seems clear. If the 
future of the world is partly determined by the conduct of 
free agents there will continually be new beginnings that were 
not foreseen ; and new possibilities will become imminent, 
that no knowledge of the past can surely forecast. All these 
possibilities will find a place within a certain ' domain ' (to 
adopt a mathematical term), inasmuch as the world was 
never a chaos, but definite from the first 2 ; and so we say 
there is no absolute contingency, no utter caprice. 

1 This has been stigmatized as a 'very scholastic distinction,' and one 
implying ' a system of pluralism,' as if that would suffice to dispose of it ! 
With this objection I have already attempted to deal elsewhere. Cf. 
Naturalism and Agnosticisin, 3rd edn, vol. 11. pp. 292 — 4. 

2 Cf. Lect. iv. pp. 70 f. 



Dr Howison on Creation 455 

Though contingent for others, a man's acts are not con- 
tingent for him: if they were, we should have to admit 
absolute contingency or chance. But if not contingent for 
him, then must they not for him be necessary ? So it has 
been argued as if 'conditioned by' were the same as 'con- 
ditioned for.' This further problem, however, is dealt with 
later. Cf. Lectures xin. and XIV. 

But the contingency in the so-called ' physical world,' 
referred to at the close of this Lecture, cannot, it may be 
thought, be the contingency of freedom : here then to deny 
immutable law is, it would seem, to assert absolute chance. 
We cannot, of course, affirm that a star or a meteor or a 
cluster of particles is an individual. But neither can we be 
confident that they are always and necessarily the merely 
inanimate aggregates we commonly take them to be. All 
that pluralism contends for, however, is simply that the real 
beings these phenomena imply have some spontaneity and 
some initiative 1 ; and to these essential characteristics of all 
real individuals the uniformity, as well as the diversity, of the 
physical world is due — the former as Natura naturata, the 
latter as Natura naturans. 

II. Dr Howison on Creation. (Lect. xi. p. 245.) 

" Not to know how a thing can be is no disproof that the 
thing must be and is," Mr Bradley has said, as Fries indeed 
had said before him. To this truth we have appealed while 
admitting that creation is to us inexplicable. But Dr Howison 
seeks to cut us off from this appeal by asserting vehemently 
and repeatedly that the idea of creation is self-contradictory — 
if the creatures, that is to say, are to be free agents and not 
merely machines. We must, he contends, either accept the 
logical consequences of Jonathan Edwards or deny their 
premise : he prefers to do the latter. " Better the atheism of 
a lost First Cause... than the atheism of deified Injustice with 

1 Cf. Lect. in. pp. 65 ff. 



456 Supplementary Notes 

its election and reprobation by sheer sovereign prerogative 1 ." 
Very true, but the one vital question to settle first of all 
is whether or no we are really shut up to these alternatives — 
forced to relinquish any idea of creation or give up freedom 
altogether. 

Despite his impressive earnestness, however, Dr Howison 
seems not to have troubled himself about this wider question 
at all. As a pluralist he, of course, disallows the absolutist's 
version of the world — that the Many are but ' modes or 
expressions of the sole self-activity of the One.' This granted, 
he begins by simply assuming that there is nothing left but 
" the Oriental, Augustinian, monarcho-theistic idea of creation 
at a certain date by sheer fiat and out of fathomless nothing." 
From this assumption he next advances to his main position 
"that creationism must logically exclude the possibility of 
freedom. For the Creator cannot, of course, create except by 
exactly and precisely conceiving, otherwise his product would not 
differ from non-entity. The created nature must therefore 
inevitably register the will and the plan of the Creator 2 ." 
This is true, but it is at all events not to the point : on the 
contrary the sentence I have put into italics covertly assumes 
that this ' plan ' cannot be the existence of a world of free 
agents. An exact and precise conception of a machine is 
possible, but an exact and precise conception of such a world 
is, it is taken for granted, logically impossible. How then do 
we come to have it ? 

Dr Howison plays unawares with a double-edged weapon 
here. For that exact and precise definition of a free agent, 
which he declares to be a contradiction from the standpoint of 
the Creator, he regards as essential from the standpoint of 
the free agents themselves. They subsist only by ' defining or 
positing ' themselves, at once " in terms of their own inerasible 
and unrepeatable particularity and of the supplemental indi- 
vidualities of a whole world of others " — in other words they 

1 The Limits of Evolnlio7i, 2nd edn, 1905, p. 341 fin. Cf. also above 
Lect. xx. p. 438. 2 Op. cit. p. 397. 



Dr Howison on Creation 457 

assign themselves a place in a series " that must run through 
every real difference from the lowest increment over non- 
existence to the absolute realisation of the ideal type 1 ." If 
exact and precise conception leave no room for freedom, what 
room can be left by unambiguous definition and position in 
a continuous series ? If Spinoza was right in denying freedom, 
as we understand it, in the one case, was not Schopenhauer 
equally right in denying it in the other ? Whether my essentia 
is really ' posited ' by God or by myself can make no difference 
to its logical character. If I must either be a non-entity or 
'utterly pre-determined,' like a machine, by exact and eternal 
specification, it is all one as regards the question of freedom 
how my essentia is raised to existentia. But if I verily am 
a free being, ' rational and untrammelled, with will to choose 
unpredestined,' there can be no contradiction in this my 
essence ; and there is then certainly none in postulating God 
as the ground of its existence. And such postulation removes 
a serious difficulty in Dr Howison's own theory, precisely the 
difficulty in fact that has led us to advance from pluralism to 
theism. That the world of the Many should verily be a realm 
of ends if it have in the One its rational ground seems 
altogether credible. But that the Many should freely posit 
themselves so as to form a 'spontaneous harmony providing 
for all individual differences compatible with the mutual 
reality of all' seems infinitely improbable. In such a vast 
election how is the precedence settled ? After all Dr Howison, 
try as he may, does not escape ' the sheer sovereign preroga- 
tive' that creation implies. The One and the Many, he 
admits, " are different and unchangeably different ; they are 
even different in species " ; for there is in every finite soul 
'a derivative life absolutely foreign to God,' on account of 
which, for lack of a better name, it has been called a 
' creature 2 .' 

Dr Howison's initial assumption will strike most people as 
out of date. The creationism ' of the old theology and of the 

1 Op. tit. pp. 351-4 f. 2 Op. cit. pp. 429, 363 f. 



458 Supplementary Notes 

plodding realist alike ' — as he styles it — so far from being the 
only one in vogue, has long been superseded. There are but 
few thoughtful people nowadays who regard the world as 
somehow made at a certain point of time by the transeunt 
activity of a so-called First Cause. Such a view I have already 
attempted to deal with. And now after all, what does 
Dr Howison himself tell us ? "Real creation" he says, " means 
such an eternal dependence of other souls upon God that the 
non-existence of God would involve the non-existence of all souls, 
while his existence is the essential supplementing Reality that 
raises them to reality ; without him they would be but void 
names and bare possibilities^." ' Void names and bare possi- 
bilities ' in such a context may fairly be taken as a rhetorical 
periphrasis for ' nothing,' and ' supplementary ' as therefore 
superfluous : in short God is here unequivocally declared to 
be the ground of the existence of the Many. Again, in a later 
passage he says : " The self-existent perfection of deity itself 
freely demands for its own fulfilment the possession of a world 
that is in God's own image and such a control of it as is alone 
consistent with its being so: a divine creation must com- 
pletely reflect the divine nature, and must therefore be a 
world of moral freedom 2 ." Surely here it is unmistakably 
recognised that though — or rather that because — God is the 
one ground of the world, the Many are free. 

1 What then are we to make of the contention that 
"creationism must logically exclude the possibility of free- 
dom " ? At first we might naturally suppose that creationism 
must here be used not with ' the real meaning ' just defined, 
but in the inappropriate sense of ' the old theology and the 
plodding realist' that is now discarded by Dr Howison in 
common with the rest of us. A free agent ' utterly predeter- 
mined ' as well as a machine not ' exactly and precisely ' 
specified is, we agree, a contradiction and a non-entity. Plainly 
then the souls that God ' raises to reality in fulfilment of his 

1 The Limits of Evolution, 2nd edn, 1905, p. xvii. Italics Dr Howison's. 

2 Op. cit. p. 75- 



Dr Howison on Creation 459 

own perfection and reflecting his own nature' cannot be 
either : for all that, the real meaning of creation may remain. 
But no, it is the real meaning of creation, as we understand it, 
that Dr Howison declares to be impossible. But how can it 
be both real and impossible? Obviously one or other of 
Dr Howison's positions must be surrendered, and, in point of 
fact, we find him explaining away the first, keeping it to the 
ear and breaking it to the hope. " Creation has a most real 
meaning, though indeed not a literal but only a metaphorical 
one x V s 

The only ground of the world, Dr Howison maintains, is 
'a principle of connexion between all minds, God included,' 
and this principle is not ontological but logical and teleo- 
logical. "As Final Cause, God is at once (1) the Logical 
Ground apart from which, as Defining Standard, no conscious- 
ness can define itself as /, nor consequently can exist at all ; 
and (2) the Ideal Goal toward which each consciousness in its 
eternal freedom moves 2 ." Now a logical ground cannot be 
the ground of the existence of anything ; that much surely is 
certain. Again, to affirm that I am in virtue of my own self- 
definition or self-position seems only a Hegelian way of saying 
that I exist of myself and know of no other ground for my 
being. So far (1) is just the position of the mere pluralist. 
And so in like manner is (2) : the Ideal there, is only the 
pluralistic goal, not a reality but an end. We may say indeed 
that ideals are always final causes ; but to talk of final causes 
as real is, I fear, but philosophical barbarism. Up to this 
point, then, it seems clear that Dr Howison has not got 
beyond ' uncompromising pluralism.' We have seen, however, 
that it is not only open to the pluralist to postulate the reality 
of God, but reasonable, theoretically and practically, to do so. 
But Dr Howison thinks, Kant notwithstanding, that his ' con- 
crete logic' enables him to supersede postulation by proof, 

1 Op. cit. p. 392. Italics mine. There is here, I fear, some confusion 
between symbol and meaning, means and end. Meaning is never meta- 
phorical though often conveyed by metaphor. 

2 Op. cit. p. 391. 



460 Supplementary Notes 

and to resuscitate 'the thrice-slain ontological argument.' 
This in its amended form he has himself thus concisely 
summarized : " The idea of every self and the idea of God 
are inseparably connected, so that if any self exists, then God 
also must exist ; but any and every self demonstrably exists, 
for (as apud Cartesium) the very doubt of its existence implies 
its existence ; and therefore God really exists V But is not 
the first premise here utterly dogmatic and flagrantly untrue, 
at least in the form which the present argument requires? 
That we cannot have the idea of God without the idea of self 
is true ; but the converse, that we cannot have the idea of self 
without the idea of God, Dr Howison, though he is continually 
asserting it, has nowhere shown to be true. On the con- 
trary, in one interesting passage, he rightly urges that — as 
regards knowledge of his existence — God " only takes the 
common lot of every soul, the fact of whose being must be 
gathered by all the rest from the testimony of their own 
interior thought 2 ." 

Dr Howison then, we may conclude, while rightly dis- 
allowing the creationism of Augustine and Edwards, along 
with that of Spinoza, as alike incompatible with the freedom 
of the created, has not succeeded in providing another in their 
place. Nor has he shown that the idea of creation advocated 
in the text involves any contradiction : indeed it would hardly 
be going too far to say that all that is intelligible on the 
subject in his own valuable book is really reconcilable with 
this. 

1 The Limits of Evolution, 2nd edn, 1905, p. 359. To demo?istrate 
the intuitive certainty of one's own existence, by the way, is a feat of 
which Descartes was not really guilty. Further, Dr Howison's version 
is much nearer the old cosmological argument than it is to the ontological ; 
and it is perhaps needless to add that the cosmological argument, if sound, 
would be very damaging to him. 

2 Op. cit. p. 258. 



461 



III. Relation of Body and Mind. 

(Lect. xii. pp. 254, 258.) 

The difference we have noted between the 'functional' 
relation of subordinate monads to their own dominant and 
their 'foreign' relation to other dominants, is the prime source 
of the difficulties that beset dualism, when — assuming two 
distinct and disparate substances — it attempts to explain the 
connexion of mind and brain. When, on the other hand, this 
connexion is regarded from the standpoint of monadism 
these difficulties seem to vanish, so soon as this difference is 
clearly recognised. There are two cardinal facts that together 
give rise to this so-called 'psychophysical problem,' both name 
and thing. First, there is the psychological fact that neither 
in perception nor in action is there any immediate experience 
of brain processes, intervening prior to the one and subsequent 
to the other. Most human beings live out their lives without 
knowing that the brain has any connexion with mind at all. 
Secondly, there is the fact that the physiologist, who traces 
the centripetal processes, that stimuli set up, till they reach 
the brain, and then traces the centrifugal processes that next 
ensue, till they reach the muscles, thereby learns nothing 
either of the perceptions that follow upon the former, or of 
the volitions that precede the latter, of these processes. 
Thus Aristotle — to take but one instance out of many — who 
knew a good deal about both psychology and physiology, 
was quite unaware of any connexion between mind and the 
brain ; which he regarded "simply as a cold, moist and sense- 
less organ destined to countervail the excessive heat of the 
heart." But the conferences of psychologists and physiologists 
have at length placed the intimate correspondence between 
psychosis and neurosis beyond doubt. The living being, that 
the psychologist regards ejectively as mind, the physiologist 
regards objectively as mechanism ; and together they find 



462 Stipplementary Notes 

that the more complex the mind the more complex the 
mechanism ; and vice versa. The problem is rightly to 
interpret this correspondence, so certainly, yet so indirectly, 
ascertained. 

At the outset there are two points on which we shall have 
to insist: one that we may fairly call an established truth, and 
another that is fundamental for monadism. First, whereas 
the mechanism that is the one object of the physiologist's 
study is altogether phenomenal, the mind that the psycho- 
logist studies is not — as the naturalist vainly strives to 
maintain — merely phenomenal or epiphenomenal ; since it 
implies the subject, or dominant monad, to whom such 
phenomenal experiences belong. Secondly, the real agents, 
whose appearances alone constitute the physiologists' phe- 
nomena, are here regarded as monads that minister as 
subordinates to this subject, or dominant monad. We have 
then to account for the fact that these monads, which to the 
physiologist appear as extended matter, Leibniz's materia 
secunda, are for their dominant monad not in this wise 
phenomenal at all. In other words, we have — if we can — 
to explain how, corresponding to the brain that for the 
physiologist is but a small part of the external world and 
continuous with it, there is for the psychologist the pre- 
sentation to an active subject, distinct from it, of the whole 
of this external world — except, of course, that small part, 
the brain, presented only to the physiologist. 

To begin : we note first that the complexity and dis- 
tinctness of the world, as object for a given subject, vary 
with its point of view. But the standpoint, or, as we might 
also say, the rank of a monad depends on its retinue of 
subordinate or ministering monads. For it, these are not 
objective, i.e. constituents of its objective world. To become 
such they must lose their functional relation as ministering 
subjects and take on that other, the foreign relation, which 
they have only for an outside observer, like the physiologist ; 
and at the same time their dominant monad — unless they are 



Relation of Body and Mind 463 

replaced — must be impoverished to a corresponding extent. 
The two relations are in this respect incompatible. And now 
it is this incompatibility that gives rise to the psychophysical 
problem, so hopeless for the Cartesian dualism with its 
disparate substances, and so simple for the personal idealist. 

We observe next that functionality is the main category 
of life : it suffices to mark off the organic and individual from 
the inorganic and its divers aggregations. But, though there 
is a real analogy between the relation of a subordinate 
monad and its dominant and the relation of an opyayov or 
instrument to the worker who uses it, there is yet an 
important difference between the two. To the tyro, his 
instrument is at first a foreign object and nothing more ; but 
as he masters it, he becomes less conscious of what it is and 
attends only to what it does. The surgeon, for example, 
while operating, feels not his sound, but what it is probing ; 
when he lays it down however, it becomes for him but an 
object once more. The function of the subordinate monad, 
then, is more intimate than that of an organ or instrument, 
literally understood ; for the relation here is not that of 
subject to object, but rather that of subject to subject. It 
means all that can be meant by immediate rapport or, as 
some in these days prefer to say — telepathy. But we get no 
light on this rapport from our individual experience as such : 
that it is and what it is, first dawn upon us at the higher level 
where, over-individual or social ends being present, social 
'organization' becomes an object of reflexion 1 . Here, as 
already pointed out, we observe cases innumerable of 
behaviour consequent solely on ' sympathetic rapport ' — 
between private citizens and public officials, for example 2 . 
These officials are persons too, no doubt ; but so far forth 

1 We have in this one more instance of our knowledge of the higher 
enabling us to interpret the lower. Cf. Lect. VII. pp. 145 f. 

2 Cf. Lect. x. pp. 218 f. It is true, as Lotze has remarked, that 
"there may be many intermediating processes producing the conditions 
on which this rapport depends"; but if we look closer we find no media- 
tion so far as the rapport itself is concerned. 



464 Supplementary Notes 

as their social functions are concerned, their position is 
analogous to that of subordinate monads; and here all 
interest in them for 'the man in the street' comes to an 
end. They are like Mr Wemmick in Jaggers' office, so 
different from Mr Wemmick with his aged P. at the Fort. 
Nor has the average man any interest in the technical details 
on which the effective working of, say the post office or the 
police, actually turns : he only knows what they mean and 
confidently relies on their services. Now our social organi- 
zation secures to its individual members wider acquaintance 
with their environment as well as fuller control over it than 
are possible in a more primitive society, and this again more 
than is possible to the naked and isolated savage. And the 
like holds good of organisms. Again, in organisms as in 
societies the cooperation of their members, so far as it is 
effective, is due to consentience and mutual adaptation rather 
than to external constraint. Once more, in organisms 'the 
technical details,' as we have called them — here the neural 
processes that come before perception and those that follow 
upon volition — are beyond the individual's interest or ken, 
till the reflective study of other organisms brings them to 
light as objective facts. It is in this way indeed that the 
ideas of organ and function first arise. 
) But these extra-cortical and subsidiary processes, that 
have no concomitants in the immediate experience of the 
dominant monad, have still for all that their psychical side ; 
just as truly as the internal arrangements of the post-office, 
though unknown to people at large, have their own social 
rapport. Indeed the facts of what we may call comparative 
neurology, normal and abnormal, though they admit perhaps 
of objective description, can, we may fairly say, be interpreted 
only subjectively. And this biologists and even physiologists 
are coming to recognise more and more. As the Ptolemaic 
astronomy was overwhelmed by the complex machinery of 
cycles and epicycles which new facts led it to assume, so 
our modern physiology has been encumbered by the reflex 
mechanisms that have accumulated as the science has 



Relation of Body and Mind 465 

advanced — a sign to many that a Copernican era for 
physiology also is at hand 1 . We may attempt, by parity 
of reasoning, either to advance from simple reflexes to more 
and more complex reflexes, keeping that is to the mechanical 
standpoint throughout ; or to regress from our own level of 
self-conscious experience to ever lower levels, without for- 
saking the subjective standpoint. Both attempts have been 
made; and the first has proved definitely a failure. Therefore 
some have supposed that possibly, as the complexity advances, 
the physical gradually becomes psychical ; but this is to take 
refuge in what at Oxford they call fieTafiacrLS eU aX\o 76^0? ; 
it is not reasoning at all but legerdemain 2 . The physiologists 
on the other hand who adopt the second alternative replace 
the system of reflex mechanisms increasing in complexity, 
by a hierarchy of zooids or psychoids comparable to inde- 
pendent organisms of varying rank, in a word, by a system 
of subordinate monads controlled by a dominant monad 3 . 

1 " The impetus given to biology by the doctrine of adaptation under 
natural selection... seems hardly as yet to have begun its course as a 
motive force in physiology. But signs begin to be numerous that such 
an era is at hand. The infinite fertility of the organism as a field for 
adapted reactions has become more apparent. The purpose of a reflex 
seems as legitimate and urgent an object for natural inquiry as the 
purpose of the colouring of an insect or a blossom." Professor C. S. 
Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, 1905, p. 236. 
" If we examine a reflex, such as that of assuming a normal position or 
removing an irritant, it soon appears that the process is by no means the 
blind mechanical response which it may at first sight be taken to be.... 
Indeed the physical response varies endlessly according to circumstances. 
It is the end attained, and not the physical response, which is simple and 
definite. A mechanism which attains ends in this way is inconceivable." 
J. S. Haldane, "Life and Mechanism," Guy's Hospital Gazette, 1906. 
Cf. also H. Driesch, Science and Philosophy of the Organism, vol. II. 

1908, pt iii. ; O. Langendorff, Nagel's Handbuch der Physiologie, Bd IV. 

1909, pp. 293-297. 

2 Cf. Naturalism and Agnosticism, Lect. IX. pp. 265 ff. 

3 Chief among these physiologists was E. Pfliiger, who already in 
1853 talked of 'spinal-cord souls' {Riickenmarkseelen). For the lower 
centres of the nervous system, he maintained, display the same kind 

w. 30 



466 Supple7nentary Notes 

And this interpretation has the support of numerous biologists, 
who trace back the genesis of the Metazoa or multicellular 
organisms to ' loose colonies ' of unicellular organisms or 
Protozoa. The new cells, resulting from the division of an 
old one, in these cases remain associated instead of scattering ; 
whereupon some differentiation and division of labour ensues 
as the natural result of their varied relation to each other 
and to the environment. In consequence they are no longer 
a law to themselves ; without ceasing to be individuals they 
become subordinate to an ' over-individual 1 .' 

The complete intimacy of the rapport between the 
dominant monad and its subordinates, which is here as- 
sumed, will suffice, we have argued, to account for the fact 
that the organism has ' windows,' — is, so to say, diaphanous 
for its own subject and yet opaque to all subjects besides. 
To the latter it has solely an objective relation, to the former 
it has primarily what we seem driven to call a subjective or 
intersubjective relation. But, it will be objected, what right 
have we to call that anything, of which we have confessedly 
no direct knowledge? Whereas in social organization we 
are aware of our fellow-men as persons who communicate and 
cooperate with us, we cannot by any amount of introspection 
or reflexion attain to any such acquaintance with these so- 
called subordinate monads. Is it not plain then, that in the 
essential point this far-fetched analogy completely breaks 
down ? On the contrary; for — as already noted — in the social 
organism there are public functionaries innumerable of whose 
existence we know nothing till the social organism is deranged, 
as in a strike, for example. Similarly, it is often only through 

of adaptation of action to situation, as the supreme centre displays : the 
difference between them, though striking, being still only a difference of 
degree. If we are to regard these lower centres as purely mechanisms, 
then we ought, in consistency, he argued, to follow Descartes and hold 
that all animals are but mechanisms. 

1 Cf. above, Lect. III. pp. 58 f., and Lect. vi. pp. 121 f. An elaborate 
exposition of the whole subject will be found in E. Perrier's Les Colonies 
animates et la Formation des Organis?nes, 2 me edn, 1898. 



Relation of Body and Mind 467 

organic pain that we are first made aware of the rapport that 
has failed in the working of our organs. This fact is all too 
familiar to impress us as it ought. Oddly enough — in spite of 
his dualism — to Descartes belongs the merit of first insisting on 
this fact, that, as he put it, mind and body compose a single 
substantial unity. Accordingly he rejected Plato's view of 
the body as merely the vehicle and instrument of the soul ; 
for if this were true, he urged, " I should not feel pain when 
my body is hurt, seeing I am merely a thinking thing, but 
should perceive the wound by the understanding alone, just 
as a pilot perceives by sight when any part of his vessel is 
damaged 1 ." It is this 'intimacy,' by Descartes miscalled 
substantial unity, that leads us to call the relation of the 
subject to its organism an internal or intersubjective relation ; 
and though it is too intimate and immediate to be called 
knowledge, yet, when we reach the level of self-consciousness, 
it may be fairly appealed to as evidence of the reality of that 
relation. 

F. A. Lange in his History of Materialism concludes the 
long chapter on Brain and Soul by saying : " The manner in 
which the external physical process (Naturvorgang) is at the 
same time an inner something for the conscious subject — this 
is just the point that lies beyond the limits of natural know- 
ledge altogether." At all events, so far the monadistic 
position seems to be nearest to these limits ; and, in view 
of the altogether elementary character of presentation and 
feeling, it is hard to imagine any further advance. The only 
alternative left seems to be that adopted by the occasionalist ; 
and perhaps to some this may seem preferable. 

1 Meditation vi. Veitch's edn, p. 160. 



30—2 



468 Supplementary Notes 

IV. The Temporal and the Eternal. 
(Lect. x. p. 194, xiv. pp. 305, 315.) 

Notwithstanding these passages in the text, I am told that 
" the whole question as to the kind of reality that belongs 
to time seems to be evaded in these lectures/' and thus my 
" lack of appreciation for the Hegelian view — that God is the 
eternal reality of which the world is the temporal expression " 
— is explained. Accordingly I am asked to give some "clearer 
indication of the way in which time is related to eternity." 
The difficulty is that the meaning of these terms themselves 
is not clear. But that they have some relation to each other 
is obvious from the fact that eternity is always described by 
reference to time. Setting out from such description I must 
then attempt, as far as a brief note will allow, to meet these 
candid criticisms. 

Eternity has been defined as infinite duration without 
succession, as an absolute mine stans, or as a totum simtiL 
But duration, succession, and simultaneity, ' the three modes 
of time,' as Kant called them, are mutually implicated ; so far 
then these definitions are either incomplete or contradictory. 
Duration is length of time regarded as uniformly flowing ; 
apart from such succession it would have no measure, and to 
speak of an infinite duration would in that case be meaning- 
less. " The now," said Hegel, " is nothing but the single now: 
duration is the universal of this now and that now." How 
then can the instant 'now' endure, or stand, absolutely ? Also 
'now' as a position in time is always relative to other positions, 
so that an absolute 'now' is unmeaning. Finally though an 
indefinite number of events may be strictly simultaneous, yet 
simultaneity — as distinct from contemporaneity — does not in- 
volve duration. But ' infinite duration ' is usually regarded, 
not as excluding succession, but as involving endless suc- 
cession. As we do not say that the whole of ' immensity,' to 



The Temporal and the Eternal 469 

use Locke's word, is spaceless, so here we should not say that 
eternity as a whole is timeless ; but simply that it is infinite 
a parte post and also a parte ante. And this is its ordinary 
or lexical meaning : that is eternal which exists ' from ever- 
lasting to everlasting.' 

At this point we may be reminded of Hegel's definition of 
eternity as ' absolute timelessness.' But this is an admission 
of the futility of all attempts, by reference to time, to determine 
what is here meant ; for a negative definition, as such, is plainly 
no determination. But since we know of nothing but 'the 
truths of reason/ which we can speak of as absolutely timeless, 
we should be led at once to suppose that this, the Spinozistic 
meaning of eternal, was Hegel's meaning too. And it was : 
" only the natural is subject to time," he said : " the true, the 
idea, the spirit is eternal 1 ." But if God is only eternal in the 
sense in which the laws of thought are called eternal, he can- 
not be real at all ; he may be an Idea, he cannot be a Spirit. 
To be sure an idea has reality as the mental image or thought 
of a conscious being, but it is only used as a symbol or meaning, 
and as such may have validity but not existence 2 . So far Hegel 
is in the same boat with Spinoza, a craft built essentially on 
the lines of the Cartesian rationalism, and 'written off' by 
Kant as shipwrecked through just this fallacious confusion of 
idea and reality. 

But we have set out from time as formal and abstract, it 
will be said : in the concrete, for perception, the temporal is 
the transient, the phenomenal, the natural ; and the eternal is 
the immutable, the noumenal, the spiritual. Time, said Hegel, 
is Chronos begetting and devouring his children. But if this 
tragic spectacle is verily the expression of ' God's eternal 
reality,' eternal cannot mean ' out of all relation to time and 
change.' The stress is now, not on absolute timelessness, but 

1 Naturphilosophie, § 258. 

2 This position has, in my judgment, been established beyond cavil by 
Lotze {Logic, § 416) and again by Bradley {The Principles of Logic, 
§§ 6 ff.). 



47° Supplementary Notes 

on a certain functional relation to the temporal process of the 
world's evolution 1 . We have passed, in fact, to the contrast 
between the noumenal and the phenomenal, the spiritual and 
the natural. The question then arises : How is change related 
respectively to these opposites ? In dealing with this question 
we have, of course, to set out from our own experience, 
and so doing we come at once on Kant's paradox — change 
pertains only to the permanent and substantial, not to the 
transitory and accidental 2 . From our standpoint, that of 
spiritual monism, a succession of events is a change only for 
an experient : from the standpoint of scientific description 
it is but a case of alteration. Strictly speaking, then, change 
for a spiritualistic philosophy implies in general some voluntary 
action on the part of one or more subjects and some non- 
voluntary perception on the part of others ; in other words it 
implies that intercourse which we call life. These subjects, 
however, are not phenomenal but noumenal. To their efficient 
activity we refer the phenomenal or natural world, that we 
perceive as 'filled time' or the course of events. The attempt 
to represent our experience as but a part of this course was 
the mistake of the sensationalist psychology of Hume and his 
successors : they failed to distinguish between alteration and 
change, between a succession of presentations and the pre- 
sentation of succession. The content of filled time is doubtless 
phenomenal, but the reality which is the source of this content 
cannot be so : the efficient cannot be its own effect. So far, 

1 Cf. A. O. Lovejoy, ' The Obsolescence of the Eternal,' Phil. Rev. 
1909, p. 490. 

2 " To arise and to pass away are not changes of that which arises 
and passes away. Change is a way of existing that follows on another 
way of existing of the very same object. Hence whatever changes is 
permanent and only its state alters {wechselt). As this alteration then 
concerns only determinations that can cease as well as begin [to be], we 
may say — using an expression seemingly somewhat paradoxical — that 
only the enduring (the substance) is changed, the variable undergoes no 
change but only an alteration, in so far as certain determinations cease 
and others begin." {Critique of the Pure Reason, First Analogy, Max 
Mutter's trans, (amended), pp. 164 f.) 



The Temporal and the Eternal 471 

time alone, as the abstract form of alteration or succession, is 
not adequate to represent change as concretely experienced 
and involving both efficient and effect. So far too, experients 
are out of time, though functionally related to it — as said 
already in the second passage of the text. 

The Hegelian distinction between eternal reality and 
temporal process then applies not only to God but also to 
us. But if so, the natural and temporal cannot be exclusively 
the expression of God's reality ; and, in fact, only the experi- 
ence that it is — at least in part — the expression of our own, 
could ever have led us to the idea of God, as spiritual and 
eternal, at all. But it is proverbial that extremes meet. So 
here : it is all one to assert with the sensationalist that our 
life is but a flux of presentations, and to deny with the abso- 
lutist that in the world's evolution our purposes are expressed. 
On either view experience becomes utterly inexplicable. If 
we avoid these extremes, then just as our life cannot be 
resolved into a temporal flux of phenomena, so the life of 
God cannot be resolved into the timeless content of an 
Absolute Idea. Both the living God and his living creatures, 
we are led to say, have alike a functional relation to the 
world's process. 

There will be important differences between the two, of 
course, and the main difference is obvious at once. Our life 
is one of development, God's life is always perfect. So far 
unchangeableness may be attributed to God, as it can be to 
none beside. We come thus upon a third, what in technical 
language would be called the axiological, meaning of eternal ; 
and this raises many difficulties, both as regards the divine 
life and our own. In contrast to God, who is blessed for 
evermore, " Man never is but always to be, blessed " the 
satirist has said. If on this ground eternal and perfect are 
fitting designations only of the one unchanging life, are not 
temporal and imperfect alone appropriate to the life that only 
is life so long as it is change ? But on the other hand, as this 
life of continuous development is the only life that we know 
or can understand, can what is eternally or absolutely the 



472 Supplementary Notes 

same, though we call it perfect, be called a life? Nay, if 
reality implies activity, or in other words ( functional relation 
to the world's process/ can purely static being be called real 
at all in any sense that we can understand ? Thus in equating 
perfect and eternal we seem after all to be back at the Spino- 
zistic or Absolutist standpoint, where the Many are absorbed 
and the whole world vanishes. And yet can we be content to 
say, not only that we are never to attain perfection, but to 
suppose that — after all — God, if he be veritably a living God, 
can never attain it either ? Thus we are confronted by two 
problems : in the case of man to connect progress and per- 
fection, in the case of God to connect perfection and life. 

Beginning with the latter — it is plain that the absolutely 
perfect could not change, if by changing it became imperfect ; 
for were this possible it could never have been perfect. More- 
over, if change in the sense of development is the only possible 
form of life, then absolute perfection must mean a sort of 
Nirvana or utter quiescence. But unless all activity is essen- 
tially an imperfection, there is no contradiction in Aristotle's 
doctrine of pure or perfect activity (ivepyeca a/civrjo-ias). But 
it will have to be more than a ' beatific vision/ if it is to be 
the ground of the world or to have the faintest interest for us. 
" An ivepyeta that ever generates the supreme pleasure of self- 
contemplation (vorjais voijaecos) 1 " will not suffice; rather we 
must have that ' intellective intuition ' which I have already 
endeavoured to describe 2 . Such pure activity limited by no 
alien ' matter/ such constancy of purpose ' without variable- 
ness or shadow of turning/ implies not change, either in the 
sense of alteration or of development, but unchangeableness 
in the sense of continuous perfect life. It is true that such 
life passes our understanding, but we can at least regard it as 
the limit towards which our own life points. And this leads 
naturally to our second problem. 

But first the attempt to represent the Divine perfection as 

1 Cf. the essay on Activity and Substance in Dr Schiller's Humanism, 
1903, pp. 211 ff. 

2 Cf. Lect. XI. pp. 23 ff. 



The Temporal and the Eternal 473 

involving ' eternal knowledge,' in such wise that — as my critic 
maintains — " for the divine intuition past, present and future, 
are all equally real and in that sense all equally present," calls 
for some notice. I have indeed already tried to deal with 
this in the last of the three passages to which this note refers; 
still for completeness sake it may be well to recur to it again 
and add one or two remarks. " The three times, past, present 
and future," said Augustine, " are three affections of the soul ; 
I find them there and nowhere else. There is the present 
memory of past events, the present perception of present ones, 
and the present expectation of future ones 1 ." The filled time 
of experience involves all three more or less. Such is the 
psychical present as distinct from the ' clock present ' ; and its 
* span/ it is assumed, may range from zero where the two 
agree, up to infinity where " der Augenblick ist Ewigkeit? But 
this span may be infinite and yet not all-inclusive; just as the 
series of odd numbers is infinite, though all the even numbers 
are left out. Moreover where the span is finite, as in our own 
experience, it never embraces more than a fraction of the 
events that lie within its limits. But then we are all confined 
to a definite ' centre,' while God we regard as omnipresent. 
Can we then still suppose that his span is not all-inclusive? 
If the relation of the future to the present is identical, save 
for difference of sign — as a mathematician would say — with 
that of the past to the present, we should certainly have no 
ground for such a supposition. There is no contradiction in 
a complete knowledge of all that has been ; for what has been 
is as fact equally real with what is. Why then should there 
be anything contradictory in a complete knowledge of the 
future ? Well, if there were not, we should have to say with 
Augustine, futura jam facta sunt' 2 . But this is just what we 
cannot say ; for it is an obvious contradiction. 

Yes, to us it may be, some will still contend, inasmuch 
as we live in time and experience things successively. The 

1 Quoted by Baron F. von Hiigel, The Mystical Element of Religion, 
1908, vol. II. p. 248. 

2 De Trinitate, v. 16. Quoted by Hamilton, Reid's Works, p. 976. 



474 Supplementary Notes 

whole point is that the divine experience is timeless, is 
eternal. " Time is the moving image of eternity," but the 
movement is illusory, like that of the landscape to the railway 
traveller. Yes, but there is real movement at the back of 
this illusion ; and the question at once arises what is the 
real at the back of ' the time illusion ' ? The restlessness 
and change begotten of want and imperfection, it will be 
replied. But this is too much at once : both change and 
defect are real and not illusory, we admit ; for the moment, 
however, it is only the former that concerns us. And the 
admission of the reality of change is enough to dispose of 
this spectacular theory of time in relation to eternity, and to 
justify our contention that expectation is not on a par with 
memory. The only basis for anticipation is past experience ; 
but though the past is one factor in determining the future, it 
is only one. There is beside the initiative of personal agents, 
to whom the whole filling of time is due ; and who, therefore, 
are not in time, as phenomena ; though, as noumena they are 
functionally related to it. Unless then God has preordained 
all that is to be done, it is surely a contradiction to say even 
of him that he has such a knowledge of the future as we have 
of the past. 

The mention just now of defect and restlessness brings us 
bacjk once more to the second of the problems to which the 
conjunction of eternal and perfect gave rise. Granted that 
perfection and changeless activity are not incompatible, 
anyhow, it is urged, creatures can never be perfect, for 
development implies not only activity but change, progress 
towards perfection, it may be, but never actual attainment. 
What is perfect is perfect always ; and what is imperfect, how- 
ever long it last, must be imperfect still. " To exist in time 
is the same thing as to exist imperfectly," Plotinus is 
reported to have said, and conversely to exist imperfectly 
is the same thing as to exist in time. But though perfection 
does not, strictly speaking, admit of degree ; it is still, we 
may reply, not absurd to speak of a perfection that is relative 
to kind. The hyssop and the fir-tree are not necessarily 



The Temporal and the Eternal 475 

imperfect because they are not cedars. Unless it were pos- 
sible for God's creatures to have a perfection of their own, 
how could perfection be attributed to God himself? Yet in 
an evolving world none could have it, if all progress as such 
implied imperfection. But, yet again, what else could we say, 
if all progress were but a succession of means to an end 
that ceaselessly recedes and never is actually realised ? This 
dualism of means and end, ' the most mischievous of all 
dualisms ' as Hoffding calls it, is here however out of place. 
Evolution is not means to an end, it is itself end. " Single 
moments in a man's life," as Hoffding truly says, " ought not 
to be merely means for other moments ; past and present 
merely means for the future. Nor will they be, if work and 
development themselves retain immediate value and can thus 
themselves be ends.... The child is then not simply a man in 
the making ; childhood becomes an independent age with its 
special tasks and its own appropriate value. In this wise 
every period of life, every part of the course of time, is to be 
understood. Then will it be possible in the midst of time to 
live in eternity.../ Eternity ' appears then not as the pro- 
longation of time... but as an expression for the permanence 
of value during the alteration (Wechsel) of the times 1 ." 
Finally — it is hardly needful to repeat — the active agents 
in weaving this variegated texture of time are not themselves 
part of its stuff, do not themselves exist in time. 

But if what does exist in time is imperfect those who 
have wrought it must be and must remain imperfect, it will 
be rejoined. To say this is to judge the future by the past 
and the whole by the part. Our development, it must be 
confessed, is not strictly ' orthogenetic ' ; it does not take the 
ideally straightest path. But it may do so when it is more 
advanced; and there may be creatures in whom it has done so 
always or at any rate does so now. And as with God so here 
perfection will not imply inaction. There may be progress 
in perfection as well as progress towards it ; thus St Luke 

1 Philosophy of Religion, Eng. trans. 1906, p. 56 f. (amended). 



476 Supplementary Notes 

tells us that "Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and in 
favour with God and man." 

Such a life of perfect development, that is, of entire 
accord with the Divine ideal, Christianity describes as 
' eternal ' : "to know God, this is life eternal." It is a life 
that endures and yet is not temporal. Is there any sense 
in which we can understand this contrast of temporal and 
eternal, and if so what ? " The world passeth away and the 
lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abideth for 
ever." We have here imperfect unsatisfying life, on the one 
side, as perishing ; and on the other, perfect life as all- 
satisfying and finally conserved. The one is empty, the other 
has eternal value : the one is always wearing away, the other 
abideth for ever. For the ' time-seeking,' ' self-serving ' man, 
it is said, dooms himself to endless disappointment, whereas 
the man who loses himself in steadfast devotion to God 
can never fail. The lapse of time, though quantitatively it 
should be alike for both, is qualitatively wholly different. 
Even now, whenever we are satisfied, there is an absorption 
in the fulness of the present, such that dem GHicklichen schlagt 
keine Stunde, as Schiller said. Then there is rest, not in the 
sense of lifeless inaction, for effective energy may at such 
times be maximal ; but rather in the sense of that r/pefjula 
which Aristotle associates with the Divine ivepyeia aKLvqcrlas 1 . 
It is perhaps this oneness with the Divine will and this 
likeness to the Divine constancy that have led to the 
mystical interpretation of such eternal life as a sort of re- 
absorption of the creature in the Creator — when time shall 
be no more. There is truth in this mysticism perhaps ; but, 
if so, all our attempts to conceive it end, as here, in contra- 
dictions. 

To resume then : we have briefly considered three senses 
in which time and eternity are contrasted, the formal, the 
ontological and the axiological — if such technical language 
may be allowed ; but in none can we find any justification 

1 Cf. F. C. S. Schiller, op. cit. p. 211 n. 



The Divine Experience 477 

for the Hegelian view, that "God is the eternal reality of 
which the world is the temporal expression " ; unless indeed 
this is interpreted in such wise as to leave the world genuinely 
a realm of ends in the pluralistic sense. That, it cannot be, 
if the temporal is reduced from the phenomenal to the illusory 
(from Erscheinung to Schein, as a German would say) ; nor if 
the eternal is raised from the noumenal to the logical, cut off 
from living activity by apotheosis in the firmament of ideas. 



V. The Divine Experience. 
(Lectt. xi. — xx.) 

This too is an important topic, which — like the last — has 
been, I am told, in these lectures unduly neglected. In the first 
plan of them, there was, I may say, to be one lecture bearing 
this very title. But at one time, the lack of definite know- 
ledge gave me pause, and at another, the mass of speculation 
and controversy there was to handle ; and so the lecture was 
never written. Still, under provocation, I now append a few 
remarks — and more or less under protest too — since they 
only bring together what has been already said more or less 
incidentally in the text. 

To have experience is to be a person among persons. 
But we are persons in a world of others who exist in- 
dependently of us. God is not in this wise a person : and 
though it be true that he is confronted by the world and 
active in it, still other persons are not for him merely 
objective (known through sense and intellection) or merely 
ejective (known through instinct or interpretation). Again, 
the world for God is the world in its unity and entirety : 
his is not a perspective view, such as 'standpoint' implies; 
nor is it a discursive view, such as our limited attention 
entails. God is ubiquitous and omnicontuitive, to coin a 
term. Finally, self-consciousness and reason in God are 



478 Supplementary Notes 

not as with us incomplete and intermittent. There are no 
' broken lights ' in him : he alone can say I am that I am. 
We may then either describe God as super-personal ; or, 
following Lotze, say " Perfect Personality is in God only : to 
all finite minds only a pale copy of it is allotted 1 ." 

Yet the divine creative intuition and the divine knowledge 
are to be distinguished ; for the knowledge presupposes the 
creation, and the relation of creator and created involves just 
that dependence which the relation of knower and known 
excludes. For knowledge does not posit or constitute its 
objects, which for spiritualism are the manifestations or 
utterances of free agents or subjects. Now, if we regard 
the divine knowledge as knowledge in this sense, and if we 
can understand it in no other, it seems to follow, as already 
said 2 , that what God merely knows is the world as there 
and as a whole, all that it has been, all that it is, and — 
being what it is, all that it tends further to become. His 
purpose or creative ideal is perfectly definite, unchangeable 
and assured. But the world's future history, the course 
by which that purpose is to be attained, depends not on 
him alone but also on the free agents, whom he sustains 
but never constrains. This course then is not part of 
his creation ; nor is it, we seem entitled to conclude also, 
part of his knowledge. Then God, it will be triumphantly 
objected, does not know what will happen to-morrow, may 
not even know, if I hesitate between bacon and fish for 
breakfast, which I shall choose. Yet this retort should not 
disconcert us : the issue is too serious to make it likely 
that it can be thus summarily decided. Fore-knowledge of 
the future is, we may contend, something of a misnomer. 
It is either not strictly fore- knowledge or it is not strictly 
knowledge. The astronomer we say calculates or predicts a 
future eclipse : but what he calculates is not fore-knowledge 
and what he predicts is only a probability. If the world 

1 Mzcrocosmus, E. t. ii. p. 688. 

2 Cf. Lect. xi. p. 236 above. 



The Divine Experience 479 

were all routine or mechanical, to forecast the future would 
be possible ; but pure mechanism is an abstraction and is 
incompatible with the novelty that the real world contains. 
But even we are not in a state of blank ignorance concerning 
the morrow, and God, who knows both tendencies and 
possibilities completely, is beyond surprise and his purpose 
beyond frustration. If that purpose is verily to allow his 
creatures some initiative, to associate them as co-workers 
with himself, it surely must needs imply some self-limitation 
and some contingency. 

And now what of the divine activity in view of such 
limitation and contingency, what of the divine office in the 
realisation of God's world and ours ? It is that Providence 
" that shapes our ends rough-hew them how we will." That 
it consists of special interferences we have every reason to 
doubt 1 ; but if we call it 'general/ this must be in the sense, 
as Kant said, "that no single thing is left out." But the 
modus operandi, so to say, here as in creation, is to us 
inscrutable. We may well believe, however, that, for example, 
— over and above the natural advance or decline that they 
entail — all our good deeds render us more, and all our evil 
deeds render us less, amenable to divine influence or in- 
spiration : the former thus tending, as Christianity teaches, 
towards life and light, the latter towards degeneration and 
darkness. But how God works with us or against, in the 
government of the world, we must again admit we do not 
know. 

But now if this divine experience is to be really experience, 
living experience, in any sense that we can at all understand 
— and to talk of it in any other would be nonsense — the 
world's history, in which God is present, must surely be more 
than a mere show or Darstellung, as Hegel called it, of what 
in every detail is eternally decreed. Providence, Jacobi has 
said, is " what, in opposition to Fate, constitutes the ruling 

1 Cf. Lect. xil. pp. 249-51, above. What is there said a propos of 
Occasionalism applies, mutatis mutandis, to Providence. 



480 Supplementary Notes 

principle of the universe into a real God." The doctrine of 
prescience and preordination may imply for us only the 
Christian idea of fate, as Leibniz called it, not the Moham- 
medan, since we have to act in ignorance of the divine 
decrees. But that doctrine robs the divine experience itself 
of all seriousness and assigns to the Highest a role that 
thousands of earnest and thoughtful men have regarded as 
altogether unworthy. Even if we rejected the eternal re- 
probation that is part of it and supposed all to end happily, 
the whole would still be devoid of any moral value : the 
actions would be the acting of puppets not the deeds of free 
persons. And as to the dramaturge himself, we might credit 
him with a singular hobby, but we could not possibly regard 
him as the God of the living, the God who is Love. 



INDEX 



Absolute, The, ideals of reached by ab- 
straction, 39-41 ; the world for these 
superfluous or illusory, 32-6 ; God- 
and-the- World as the concrete, 241 f. ; 
objection to this, 242 ; reply, 243 

Absolutism (see also Singularism), 52, 
267 

Action, springs of, the contrast of ' extra- 
regarding ' and ' self-regarding ' too 
extreme, 342-5 

Activity, 7L ; purposive, as presupposing 
order, 67 f. ; as producing it, 7 if., 
75^78 

Adamson, R., 48 

Agnosticism, its so-called Monism, 10 ; 
what it overlooks, 413 

Argyll, late Duke of, on the Argus 
pheasant, 188 

Aristotle, on Creation, 31; his Absolute, 
38 ; his practical syllogism, 68 ; on 
the discontinuity between man and 
brute, 91 ; on disjecta membra^ 120; 
on efficient cause, 274 ; on action, 
330 ; soul as entelechy of the body, 
397; on the brain, 461 ; on perfect 
activity, 472, 476 

Aspects of the world, 1 f., 430 ; the 
natural and the spiritual as contrasted, 
2f., 431 ; the latter as the more 
fundamental, 10-3, 431 f. 

Augustine, on predestination, 310 ; on 
time, 472 f. 

Bacon, F., on the generating of new 
natures, 73 ; on final causes, 275 

Bagehot, on custom, 358 

Bahnsen, on Hartmann, 334 n. 

Bain, denied the reality of self, 289 f. 

Behaviour, 50, 62, 433 ; continuity be- 
tween the natural and rational planes 
of, 342-5 

Beneke quoted, 29 

Bergson, Prof. H., his ilan vita/, 238 n. ; 
referred to, 298 n., 305; on 'concrete 
time,' 306 n. 



Berkeley, his sense-symbolism, 216 f., 
as divine revelation, 261 f. ; his oc- 
casionalism, 248, 249 

Bionomics, as illustrating pluralism, 
56-8 

Birth, the problem of, 204 f. 

Boehm, Jacob, and Hegel, 166, 182 

Bosanquet, Prof. B., quoted, 136 

Boscovich, his centres of force, 255 i. 

Bradley, Mr F. H., quoted, 1, 24 ; on 
pluralism, 23 f., 201; on God and 
the Absolute, 43 f. ; on the idea of 
potentiality, 108 n. ; on the ideal 
voluptuary as impossible, 345 n. 

Buffon quoted on Nature's ' ill-assorted 
designs,' 86 

Caird, E., on monotheism, 30 ; on 
Aristotle's theology, 32 f. ; on that 
of Plotinus, 33 ; on the social character 
of self-consciousness, i28f.; on selfish 
interest in immortality, 388 n. 

Categories, source of, 1 1 f. ; Kant's 
table of, 228 

Causa sui, the Absolute as, 32, 199 ; 
the Many as severally, 199 

Causality, principle of, 275; as a postu- 
late, 277 

Cause, as category, n ; efficient and 
occasional distinguished, 75 ; its 
meanings, 273-5 ; the noumenal as 
cause of the phenomenal, 303 f., 438 

Chance, 68, 75, 76, 267, 454 f. 

Change, 305, 469 ; and alteration dis- 
tinguished, 470 ; God as unchanging 
and yet living, 472 ; and imperfection, 

473-5 
Chaos, inconceivable, 70 
Character, transmission of acquired, 

2 10 ; a man's character and his nature, 

286-8, and his objects, 289 
Clifford, W. K. , on conscience, 368 ; 

his ethics of belief, 413 
Collier, A., as anticipating Berkeley ^ 

249 



W. 



31 



482 



Index 



Comte, A., on Nature and Humanity, 
20; J. S. Mill on, 134 

Conduct {see Behaviour) 

Conscience, what it means and how it 
arises, 365-8 

Conscious automata, 6 f. 

Conservation of Mass and Energy, 103, 
109; of the organic, 212; of value, 
213 ; of momentum, 280 

Contingency, 76, 78, 316, 434; in the 
world, an argument for pluralism, 80; 
illustrated from the useful arts, 80 f. ; 
from zoology and botany, 81 f. ; 
analogies between the two, 83 f. ; 
and the ' Natural Right ' to live, 
87-9 ; and the existence of mankind, 
89-92 ; and of particular individuals, 
93 f. ; and the physical world, 94-6, 
455 ; implies a definite 'domain,' 454 

Continuity, the Principle of, 20 ; and 
Pluralism, 52, 54, 185, 188, 433 

Creation, ancient ideas of, 31 f. ; idea 
of, from the standpoint of pluralism, 
191 ; theistic idea of, 231 ; as respects 
the world, 231-3 ; as respects God, 

233 f . ; as ' intellective intuition,' 

234 f. ; does not identify God and 
the world, 237 ; analogous to the 
originality of genius, 238-40 ; dif- 
ficulties, 242-6 ; represents God as 
not absolute, 242 f. ; and so implies 
limitation, 243 f. ; this, even if self- 
limitation, incompatible with omni- 
potence, 244 ; the idea certainly 
transcendent, and yet not unphiloso- 
phical, 245 f. 

Creative Synthesis, 104 f., 434 ; the 
idea due to Lotze and Wundt, 104 ; 
instances of, 104 f. ; not appreciated 
by sensationalism, 105 ; results from 
the activity of subjects, 105, 106; 
source of new values, 109 ; secures 
an increase of directed energy and 
of determinate structure, 109 

Cuvier, ignored evolution, 15 

Darwin, C, on connexion of cats and 
red clover, 57 ; on the variety in 
Nature, 82 f. ; on Unity of Type 
and variety of conditions, 84 f. ; on 
Man's simian ancestry, 89 ; on 
Natural Selection and progress, 1 1 5 f . ; 
thought Sexual Selection would ac- 
count for animal ornamentation, 188 

Death, the problem of, 212-4 ; for the 
mere animal, 385 f. 

Descartes, his dualism, 7, 260, 463 ; his 
Cogito ergo sum, 45, 460 n. ; on the 



difference between man and brute, 
91 ; regarded mind as substance, 
392 ; on body and mind as a sub- 
stantial unity, 467 

Desire, 328-30 ; presupposes feeling, 
328 ; its relation to will, 329 

Determination, two forms of, 277-9, 
their difference, 279-81, 438, where- 
in it lies, 280, are they mutually 
exclusive, 282 f. ; Self-determination, 

279 f., 288 f. ; a determining self 
denied, 289 f. 

Determinism, and Indeterminism, am- 
biguity of these terms, 273 ; thorough- 
going, 282 f. 

Direction, as guidance of lower by 
higher, in f., 280 f. ; two senses of, 

280 f. 

Drews, A., a criticism of Hegel, 165 n. 

Dualism, 7, 10 

Duality in unity, of experience, 10, 26, 

430. 
Duration, 305 f., 468 

Eckhart, 34, 39, 43 

Edwards, Jonathan, quoted, 308, 312 

Effect, compound and heteropathic dis- 
tinguished, 102 f. ; the latter alone 
merely quantitative and abstract, 102 

' Elective Affinities,' 63 

Empedocles, ' the Newton of organic 
nature,' 63 

Ends, ' Heterogony of,' 79 f., 93, 149, 

155 

Energy, dissipation of, 203, 360 ; 
spiritual, increase of, 280 

Environment, differentiation of, 61 ; 
adaptation to and adaptation of, 106, 
in; social and physical approxi- 
mated through habit, 60, 219 

Epigenesis, theory of, propounded by 
Harvey, 98 ; its meaning, 98 ; as 
'creative synthesis,' conflicting with 
theism, 270 f. 

Equilibration, as implied in Epigenesis, 
101, 115 

Eternity, as formal, 468 f. ; as onto- 
logical, 469-71 ; as axiological, 
471-6 

Eugenics, 94 

Evil, no principle of, 131, 376, 439 ; 
no ' solidarity 'of, 133 ; physical, as 
a difficulty for pluralism, 202 f. ; not 
simply negative, 318, 376 ; problem 
of, in what sense soluble, 319, 439 ; 
what in one way evil in another 
good, 350, 440 ; such relative evil 
implied in evolution, 351 ; but is the 



Index 



483 



evolution of our world the best ? 
351-3 ; where the Many have some 
initiative, contingency seems in- 
evitable, 352 f. ; in this world, it is 
replied, there are many superfluous 
evils, but can this be proved ? 353 ; 
so-called metaphysical evil, 354 f., 
440 f. ; alleged superfluous evils, 
356-60; error incidental to ex- 
perience may be worth what it costs, 
356 f. ; but there are physical evils 
not to be thus accounted for, 357 ; 
here we have to recognise the con- 
servative factors of natura naturata, 
357-60, 439 ; inevitable dissolution a 
mistake of naturalism, 360 f. {See 
also Moral Evil) 

Evolution, meaning of, 97 f., 351, 434 ; 
the earlier theory alone a strict 
evolution, 98, incompatible with 
Darwinism, 98, implies pre-forma- 
tion and a 'block universe,' 99, 
originated for biology in a mistake 
of Malpighi, 99 ; and upheld by the 
philosophers, Regis, Malebranche 
and Leibniz, 99, and, as singularistic, 
by Hegel, 100 ; the later theory of 
Evolution {see Epigenesis), as plural- 
istic, is here upheld, 101 ; beginning 
of, as inconceivable, 195, 265 f. ; 
theistic interpretation of, 267-9 '■> 
objection to the actual evolution of 
the world, 351-61 

Experience, and differentiation of 
presentations, 77 ; a definition of, 
413 ; the divine, 477 

Faith, as 'primitive credulity' or trust- 
fulness, 12, 414-6; analogies to, in 
the biological world, 415^, 448; 
always ' room for faith ' and need of 
it, 416; rational belief, its final 
phase, 416 f., this amenable to logic, 
417 ; distinct from prudence, 418 ; 
meaning of rational in this con- 
nexion, 418 f. ; practical grounds for 
theistic faith, 421-3, its theoretical 
value, 423 ; why only faith, when the 
need for knowledge is vital ? 423-5 ; 
rationality of belief in a future life, 
425-8, this depends on the value of 
man and his work, 425 f . ; faulty 
counter arguments, from the analogy 
of the lower forms of life, 426 f., and 
from evolution, 427 f. ; faith in the 
moral ideal a personal matter, not 
merely a matter of evolution, 428 f. ; 
faith and knowledge the two voices, 



441; faith and life, 448 f. ; the test 
of faith, 450; religious faith, 186, 
450 f., 452 

Fall, doctrine of the, 362 f. ; ignores 
evolution, 363, 368 f. 

Fate, as implying freedom, 271 f . ; as 
denying freedom, 295 

Feuerbach, his secession from Hegel, 
46 

Fichte, J. G., 35, 47, 198, 330; his 
Anstoss, 37, Gegenstand and Wider- 
stand, 40 ; on moral order, 381 

'Finite God,' 43, 194, 316, 353, 443 

Fixity of Type, and variety of con- 
ditions, 83-5 ; and grotesque forms, 

85-7 

Foreknowledge, and purpose, 3iof. ; 
and eternal knowledge, 312-5, 473 

Fouillee, on unity of society, 117 n. 

Freedom, of the will, a misleading 
phrase, 272 ; freedom as noumenal, 
294 f., 303 f. ; freedom and fore- 
knowledge, 296-8, 473 

Fries, J. F., on memory, 396 ; referred 
to, 455 

Function, a unity depending on com- 
plexity of structure, 109 ; gradual 
mechanization of lower functions by 
habit, no; interdependence of higher 
and lower, nof. 

Future Life, difficulties about, 387 f. ; 
not removed by dogmatic argu- 
ments, 388 f. ; Kant's supposition of 
personality as transferable, 389 f. ; 
metaphysical doctrines about sub- 
stance here useless, 393 ; the question 
one of value, 393 ; no positive 
evidence against, 393 f. ; for personal 
continuity need continuity of memory 
and of environment, 395 ; as to the 
former, objective records at all events 
persist and can be read more the 
higher the level of life attained, 396 f. ; 
the analogy between birth and re- 
embodiment, 398 f. ; various hypo- 
theses about the latter, all implying 
dualism of body and soul, 400 ; but 
the interaction of subjects lies deeper, 
and makes the way to belief easier, 
401 ; as to environment, two views 
to consider, (1) re-incarnation, 401-5, 
temporary discontinuity supposed to 
be bridged by latent memories 
eventually revived, 402, and pro- 
gression by ' elective affinities ' that 
determine each re-birth, 402 f., these 
minimise the difficulty connected 
with heredity, 403 f.; the theory of 



31 



484 



Index 



pre-existence credible, 404 f. ; (2) 

'transfiguration,' 405-7; death and 

sleep, 407 f. ; moral arguments for, 
409-12, 441 

Galton, F., quoted on Eugenics, 94 

Geddes and Thomson, Proff., their 
Evolution of Sex quoted, 59 ; on the 
pre-formation theory of evolution, 98 

God [see Theism) ; self-limitation of, 
243 f., 316, 437 ; from the point of 
view, of Man, 442-4; and eternity, 
468-76 

Goethe's account of ' the fall ' and 
Hegel's, 166 ?z. ; his notion about 
paternal and maternal traits adopted 
by Schopenhauer and Hartmann, 

334 
Good, Idea of the, 18 f., 114, 433; 

the highest not diminished by being 

diffused, 112 
Green, T. H., his Prolegomena quoted, 

133, 134, 135; on hedonism, 348 n. 

Habit as mechanization, 74 

Hsecceity, 65 

Haeckel, Prof. E., referred to, r, 27, 
37, 63, 90, 99, 208 

Hamilton, Sir W., his Natural Realism, 
260 n. ; on predestination, 311 f. ; on 
action, 329 f. 

Hartmann, E. von, criticism of 
Pluralism, 1 99 f. ; clairvoyance of 
the unconscious, 238 ; criticisms 
of Schopenhauer, 324, 330 f. ; em- 
pirical proof of pessimism, 325-8 ; 
psychological deduction of it, 328-30 ; 
the Absolute, as Will and Idea, 331, 
absolutely stupid and absolutely wise, 
333 ; theogony, 331-3 ; cosmogony, 
333-5 ; ' evolutional optimism,' 334; 
the end and after, 335 ; two Absolutes 
in conflict, 335 f. ; his scheme of re- 
demption brings out his fundamental 
inconsistencies, 337 f. 

Hedonism, a characteristic of optimism 
and pessimism, 339 ; its assumption, 
339/., and the 'hedonistic paradox' 
inconsistent, 340, this implies ends 
distinct from pleasure, 340 ; without 
these experience inconceivable, 341-5; 
and these ends never simply means 
to pleasure, 345-7 ; if objective and 
subjective factors both essential to 
experience, the one cannot be merely 
means to the other, 347 f. ; but we 
find an approximation to this in 
parasitism, 349 



Hegel, 22 ; his Philosophy of History, 
16, 138; the real the rational, 23; his 
Absolute Idea, 22, 34, 38, 46 ; on 
Descartes, 45 ; recognised heterogony 
of ends, 79 n., 149 ; on evolution, 
100, 269 ; his doctrine of ' objective 
mind,' H9f. ; on the cunning of 
reason, 133, 155, 157 ; his Pheno- 
menology of Mind, 139 n. ; relation of 
dialectic to time, 143 ; the time-illu- 
sion, 151; a symbol and a motto for 
his philosophy, 152 ; this said to have 
been a philosophy of the unconscious, 
154 ; follows Jacob Boehm, 166; re- 
jected the plurality of worlds, 181 f. ; 
on Paradise, 360 ; definition of eter- 
nity, 468 f. ; time as Chronos, 469 ; his 
Pluralism, 138-58 : — dialectical and 
historical development, their relation, 
139 ; he oscillates between them, 141 ; 
neglecting the problem of time that 
is implied, 143 ; acknowledges con- 
tingency in Nature, 139 f. , and 
therewith plurality, 140 ; finds a 
gradual progress from Nature to 
Spirit, 142, the former showing only 
routine but the latter novelty, 143 ; 
yet Nature potentially Spirit from the 
first, 144 f.; we interpret the lower 
by the higher, which yet is developed 
from it, 145-7 > to this development 
the interest of the agents concerned 
is essential, 147 ; ' though they are 
not conscious of its end at the first, 
148, but only instruments of the 
World-Spirit, like natural forces for 
an architect erecting a house, 149 ; 
with this World-Spirit the Logic does 
not deal, 149 f. ; in the Philosophy 
of Mind it seems to be the realised 
plan of the house, 150; the doctrine 
of Teleology does not help, 151 f . ; 
nor does the Philosophy of Nature, for 
here Mind is not yet ' come to itself,' 
152-4 ; nor is it clear that for Hegel 
Nature only appears as a plurality, 
154 f. ; the house seems to build 
itself, and Hegel's Philosophy of 
History suggests not one mind but a 
living organization achieved by many, 
156-8. The Hegelian Unity, 159- 
80 : — seems to be a plurality 
organized into a unity, 159; to be 
pantheistic rather than theistic, 160; 
this apparent in his doctrine of the 
Trinity, 160-77 '•> tne Kingdom of 
the Father answers to pure thought, 
where all determinationists are 



Index 



485 



posited as ideal, not as real, 16 1-4; 
in the Kingdom of the Son we 
reach the objective as fact, 164 ; 
but the relation of the Son to the 
World discloses two forms of ' the 
Other,' one ideal, eternal and true, 
and one actual, temporal and illusory, 
165-9; his doctrine of development 
should explain this transition from 
the ideal or potential to the actual, 
169-72 ; but here we find that the 
actual is first, 173 ; accordingly in 
the Kingdom of the Spirit the Idea 
comes to consciousness of itself only 
in humanity, 174-7. In the Pheno- 
menology, this gradual process towards 
ultimate unity is traced, 177-9, an< ^ 
here, as elsewhere in Hegel's works, 
unity is actually result, 1 80 

Helmholtz, on causality, 275, as a 
postulate, 300 

Heracleitus and Hegel, 139 

Herbart, his pluralism, 47 

Heredity, problem of, 206-12, 403 f. 

Historical Method, neglected in the 
1 8th cent, dominant in the 19th, 
14-6, 120; forwarded by Hegel, 
16 

History, contrasted with Science, 3, 14, 

282, 433 ; and the Individual, 18 f. ; 
its Wholes not classes, 19 ; no 
transition from dialectical develop- 
ment to historical, 141-3, 352 ; 
from the standpoint of the Absolute 
such transition superfluous, 32 f., 

Hobbes, on the problem of freedom, 

283, 286 

Hobhouse, Prof. L. H., on sin, 371 

Hoffding, Prof. H., on mysticism, 35 ; 
his theory of the conservation of 
value, 131 n.\ a query about Hegel, 
182 ; on the dualism of means and 
end, 475 

Howison, Prof. G. H., 261 n., 271, on 
Creation, 455-60 

Humanity, as End, the Comtian and 
the Christian view compared, 386 f. 

Hume quoted, 242 n. ; on the idea of 
self, 289 ; on the problem of evil, 
317 f.; on custom, 358; on im- 
mortality, 386 

Huxley, on the banishment of spon- 
taneity, 14 ; no arresting the pro- 
cession of the great year, 360 f. ; 
wanted a one-sided freedom, 372 f . ; 
on belief in immortality, 394 n. ; an 
agnostic question, 413 



Idealism (see Spiritualism) 

Indiscernibles, Identity of, 195, 433 

Individual, the, 50 f., 52 ; always 
unique, 18, 50, 63 f., 6^ 433; and 
atom, distinguished, 51, 433; of 
orders higher than man, 185-8, re- 
cognised by Leibniz and Fechner, 189 

Individuality of men contrasted with 
that of plants and animals, 116 

Inertia, a negative concept, 8; and 
guidance or spontaneity, 9, 279; and 
conservation of momentum, 280 f. 

Intellective Intuition, 234 f. ; implies 
more than absolute knowledge, 235-7 ; 
and more than absolute self-con- 
sciousness, 237 f. 

Interaction, the problem of, 215-9, 
differs in cases of things and of per- 
sons, 217 f. ; in the latter 'sympathetic 
rapport' is possible, 2i8f., interaction 
so regarded, 257-9 

James, William, on 'a block universe,' 
309, 351 ; on Leibniz's Theodicy, 
317 ; on belief, 413 

Jowett, on divine self-limitation, 316 

Justice, 115, 116, 364 

Kant, on the Realm of Nature and the 
Realm of Ends, 2, 411 ; on life, 75 ; 
distinguishes between ' educt ' and 
'product,' 98; his synthetic unity of 
apperception in relation to creative 
synthesis, 105 ; on mutuum com- 
mercium, 106, 114; denies jural re- 
lations between man and brute, 116; 
his 'deduction of the categories,' 
124-8, as subjective, is inconclusive, 
125, as objective, overlooks inter- 
subjective intercourse, 127; 'radical 
wickedness' denied, 131; impressed 
by the French Revolution, 135 ; on 
the primacy of the practical reason, 
198, 330; his table of categories a 
piece of mistaken ingenuity, 228 ; 
the theistic ideal, its ' regulative use,' 
230 f., on knowledge and intellective 
intuition, 234 f., his doctrine of free- 
dom, 292-5 ; inconsistent in main- 
taining 'empirical' determinism, 299 f.; 
on man as noumenal and as pheno- 
menal, 301 ; the 'causality of freedom,' 
303 f. ; on Negative Quantities, 307 ; 
failure to prove does not disprove, 
319; moral evil a mystery, 363; view 
onpersonality and substance criticized, 
389 f. ; his category of substance, 
391 f. ; traces of monadism in, 392 ; 



486 



Index 



on the body as possibly an impediment, 
397 ; at one time taught the pre- 
existence and immortality of the soul, 
404 n. ; the moral argument for 
future life, 411 f. ; knowing by doing, 
414; distinguishes between change 
and alteration, 470 
Knowledge presupposes conation, 11, 
106, 413 f. 

Lange, F. A., on ' Brain and Soul,' 467 

Laplace, 15, 17, 67 

Leibniz, 20, his Monadology, 47, as 
typical for pluralism, 53, its 'pre- 
established harmony' rejected, 54, 
248, its pampsychism, 61, its identity 
of indiscernibles, 64, it ' destroys 
atoms,' 65 ; resembles occasionalism, 
250, his Letters to S. Clarke quoted, 
64; admits a discontinuity between 
man and brute, 91 ; held the pre- 
formation theory of evolution, 98, 
205 , as a corollary of his pre-established 
harmony, 99 f. ; on the tendency 
towards perfection, 130^.; Hegel 
and Leibniz, 139, 145 ; on pre- 
existence, 205; on death, 212, 213; 
his objections to occasionalism, 249- 
51; his petites perceptions, 256; his 
monads have 'no windows,' 260; 
the sincerity of his Theodicee ques- 
tioned, 321 ; on nature's thoroughness, 

357 

Leopardi quoted, 320 n. 

Lessing quoted, 373 f. 

Lewes, G. H., quoted, 146 

Life, and the mechanical, 4, 9; 'per- 
sistent types' of, 60, 61 ; dependence 
of higher forms on lower, 61 ff. 

Locke, his Indian philosopher, 226; 
on meaning of freedom, 272; on 
conscience, 386 n. ; on mind as sub- 
stance, 390 f. 

Lockyer, Sir N., on Inorganic Evolu- 
tion, 75 n., 95 f. 

Lotze, on Chaos, 70; referred to, 76, 
302, 391; recognised 'creative syn- 
thesis,' 104 n. ; on Hegel's Absolute 
Spirit, 1 7 1 ; his objections to pluralism, 
215-24, as regards 'transeunt action,' 
215 f.; the world really the self- 
conservation of the Absolute, 216 f., 
here he resembles Berkeley, 216; his 
occasionalism, 248, 249; on the 
genesis of the soul, 263 f . ; on a 
block universe, 309 f. ; on problem 
of evil, 318; on our impatience with 
God's ways, 357; on moral order, 



381 f.; on Kant's supposition of 
personality as transferable, 390; on 
immortality, 393 

Mach, Prof. E., on Physics, 17; on the 
mechanical theory, 103 

Mackenzie, Prof. J. S., his Manual of 
Ethics, 329 n. 

Malebranche, his occasionalism, 249; 
quoted, 251 

Man, gulf between him and the brute, 
90-2, recognised in the book of 
Genesis, 90, by Aristotle, Descartes, 
Leibniz, Dr A. R. Wallace, 91 f., 
biological and sociological grounds 
for denying it, 92 f. ; ' natural man ' 
and ethical person, 120; in becoming 
social man becomes rational, 121 

Many, the, as 'ejects,' 29; no way 
from them to the Absolute, 29 

Marshall, Prof. A., on a 'law of in- 
creasing return,' 132 

Martensen, his Christian Dogmatics 
quoted about the Trinity, 190 ; on 
the world as a divine comedy, 383; 
on purgatory, 406 

Martineau on divine self-limitation, 

315 f- 

Matter, the concept of, from the stand- 
point of pluralism, 254-7 

M c Taggart, Dr J. M. E., on future 
life, 403 

Mechanical Theory, the, described, 3-5 ; 
its abstract character, 5, 1 1 ; advocated 
by Laplace, 15; its inadequacy as 
regards evolution, in that it implies 
reversibility, 103 

Memory, implied in our cognition, 255 ; 
and 'psychical present' or range in 
time, 256 f. ; not the same as objective 
records, 395 ; the subjective function 
presupposed in these seems inex- 
plicable, 395 f. ; and obliviscence, 396 

Merz, J. T., History of European 
Thought quoted, 15 

Metaphysic, without assumption, futile, 
225-8 

Metempsychosis, 205, 213; inaccuracy 
of the term, 402 n. 

Method, of these lectures, 1, 22 f., 442 

Mill, J. S., on compounding and 
intermixing effects, 102 ; on the 
humanitarian ideal, 134; on the 
eternal perdition of the heathen, 425 

Millennial dreams, 112 f., 360 

Monads, the world of, 54 ; differentiation 
of the environment of, 61, 62 ; 
dependence of higher on lower, 62 ; 



Index 



487 



God la monade primitive (Leibniz) or 
Monas monaditm (Bruno), 190 f. ; 
the 'bare monad,' 195, 254-7; 
'dominant monads' or souls, 195, 
196; and their organism, 257-9; 
1 functional ' and ' foreign ' relations 
distinguished, 257 f., 461-4; have 
'windows,' 260, 466 

Monism, Agnostic, 10; Spiritualistic, 
12 f., if true, should explain the 
appearance of mechanism, 14, 18, 20; 
Materialistic, 13 

Moral Evil, and evolution, the transition 
from innocence to knowledge of good 
and evil, 364-8 ; wrong-doing without 
guilt, 364 f. ; not sin as theologically 
defined, 37of. ; and temptation, 371 f. ; 
a world in which it was impossible, 
not a moral world, 372 f., and inferior 
to this, 373 f . ; lies between two 
limits, 374 f. ; is the upper limit 
attainable? 375-7 

Moral Government of the World, 377— 
84; God's ways and our ways, 377 f.; 
the view of Job's comforters, 378 f. ; 
is it possible without special inter- 
ferences? 379 f. ; and what evidence 
for it is there apart from these? 380-2 ; 
an alleged inconsistency explained, 

382 f. ; the world as a divine comedy, 

383 f- 

Moral Ideal, the, 136, 229 f., 420 f., 
422, 425, 429, 441 

Motives, contrasted with forces, 283-5 ; 
according to thorough-going deter- 
minism, both alike imply necessitation, 
285 f. 

Mysticism, 34 f., 41, 43 

Naturalism, 3 ; its theory of conscious 
automata, 6 ; its distinction of phe- 
nomena and epiphenomena, 6 f. ; 
treats psychical activity as illusory, 
7 f. ; fails to account for living 
guidance, 8 f. ; its alliance with 
Agnosticism, 10; misunderstands its 
own standpoint, 12 f. ; 360 f. 

Natural right to live, 87-9, 116 

Natural Selection, 115, and Rational 
Selection, 116 

Natura natarans and Natura naturala, 
72 f., 298, 357 f., 433 

Nature, 3, 5, 10, as the One, 27; as 
'prior to Mind,' 252, 262-5 ; in what 
sense this true, 264 f. 

Necessitarianism, not proved empiri- 
cally, 307 ; but by many Theists 
regarded as axiomatic, 308 f., 438 



Necessity, on absolute, 226; so-called 

natural, 275^; logical, 275 ; real, 276f. 
Newton, Sir Isaac, his Priucipia, 3, 

quoted, 4 
Nicholas of Cusa, 35, as precursor of 

Leibniz, 64 
Nietzsche, his Heldenmoral, 116; his 

Over-man, 451 
Nutritive chains, 57 f. 

Objectivity, Hegel's 'objective mind,' 
119 f. ; cannot belong to a merely 
individual experience, 122-4 ; mutual 
implication of", and self-consciousness, 
124, the two advance pari passu, 129 ; 
according to Hegel's Smaller Logic, 

151 

Occasionalism, 248-53, usually assumed 
by Theists, 248, its origin in the 
Cartesian dualism, 248, and subse- 
quent modification, 248 f. ; defensible, 
248-52; but not indispensable, 253 ; 
less simple than real interaction, 257, 
260; its epistemological difficulties, 
259 f. 

Omnipotence, 244, 353-5 

Omnipresence, 250, 270 

Omniscience, 235 f. 

One, The, and the Many, as problem, 
22, 25 f., methods of approaching 
this, 22 f. ; vacillations of theologians 
and philosophers concerning it, 

43-7 

One, The {see also Absolute), as Abso- 
lute Object, 27 f., 37; as Absolute 
Subject, 29 f., 37; as Absolute 
Self-consciousness, 30, 38 f. ; as 
mystical, 33-5 ; as World-soul, 35 f. ; 
as primus inter pares, 42, 52 

Optimism, superficial, 317, 320—2 

Order, what it implies, r8, 20, 381, 
433 ; how far presupposed in -pur- 
posive action, 67 f., 71 f. 

Organism, external correlations, 56-8 ; 
internal, 58 f. ; as defined by Kant 
and Hegel, 118, as hierarchy of 
monads, 209, as primary medium of 
the soul's life, 211 f. 

Origen, on the divine prescience, 310 

Paley, on conception and resurrection, 

398 n. 
Palingenesis, 99, 206 
Pampsychism, 20 f., 62 f. ; advocates 

of, 63 n. ; theistic objections to, 

260-2 
Pascal quoted, 208 
Peirce, C. S., quoted, 74, 350 



488 



Index 



Perception, implies creative synthesis, 
104 f. 

Pessimism, morbid, 320; as reaction 
to optimism, 320-2; of Schopenhauer, 
322-4; of Hartmann, 324-38 

Physical World, so-called, analogies to 
it in the living world, 60; may be 
continuous with this, 61, 66 f. 

Physionomics, as illustrating pluralism, 
58 f- 

Plato, on Creation, 31 ; his World-soul, 

35 

Pleasure and pain, as respectively nega- 
tive and positive, 322 f . ; as both 
positive, 324; in relation to desire 
and will, 328 f. ; the pleasures of 
pursuit, 329 

Plotinus, his theology, 33; his doctrine 
of 'emanation,' 36; the body the 
river of Lethe, 406 

Pluralism, 24, 49 ; the start from, 47 f., 
432 ; its standpoint, historical, 50; is 
it final? 200 f., 435 ; its leading con- 
cepts, Individuality and Behaviour, 
50 f. ; accounts for the contingency 
and the uniformity in the world, 51, 
as exemplified in the social world, 
54-6, in the biological world, 56-9 ; 
in the so-called physical world, 59-67 ; 
upper limit of, discussed, 185-94 ; 
empirically unattainable, 42 f., 196, 
436 ; the ' Supreme ' as only primus 
inter pares, 191 ; and, as immanent in 
this world, subject to its fundamental 
conditions, 193 f. ; lower limit of, 
195-7, also unattainable, 196^; if 
not, what should we reach? 265 f.; 
a \Prim11m movens relating the two 
limits, 197, 436, this rejected by 
voluntaristic pluralists, 197-9 ; diffi- 
culties of, physical, 203-5, catastro- 
phes, 203 f. , dissipation of energy, 
203 f . ; psychophysical, 204-15, as 
regards birth, 204 f., heredity, 206- 
12, death, 212-4; need for con- 
servation of values and personal 
continuity, 2i4f. ; metaphysical, 215- 
24, as regards interaction, 215-9, the 
fact of sympathetic rapport, 220-2, 
and the unity that plurality implies, 
222-4. If pluralism contradictory, 
singularism the only alternative, 201, 
but the way to theism is barred, 224, 
245, 436. For pluralism, material 
phenomena due to the interaction of 
the many, 247, 253 

Plurality of Worlds, rejected by the 
Church, Hegel, Wesley, Whewell, 



and Dr A. R. Wallace, 181 -3; a 
problem for the pluralist as well as 
for the theologian, 183 ; fallacious- 
ness of arguments against, 183 f. ; 
Tom Paine's objections to Christianity 
based on it, and the replies of Fuller 
and Chalmers, 184 f . ; nature of the 
connexion between different worlds, 
185 ; principle of continuity leads 
us to posit higher orders of intelli- 
gence, 185 f., 435 ; Dr A. R.Wallace's 
arguments, 186-9 

Potentiality, source of the idea, 108 

Poynting, Prof. J. H., referred to, 204, 
281 

Predestination, 308-12; attempts at 
conciliation, 310-5; prescience not 
causation, 310 f . ; conciliation a 
matter of belief not of knowledge, 
312; distinction between foreknow- 
ledge and eternal knowledge, 312-5 ; 
the pluralisms via media, 315 f., 438 

Priestley, his materialism, 255 n. ; on 
motives, 287; Reid on, 311 

Pringle-Pattison, Prof., quoted, 46, on 
Aristotle's philosophy, 138; on 
Hegel, 140 

Progress, 79, 93, 97, H3f., 115, 130, 
434 ; as advance towards a higher 
unity, 131, 133, 134; no law of 
diminishing return here, 131 f. ; seems 
small and slow, 133 ; past and future, 
134; without decline, 361 

Protozoa, the, transition from to the 
Metazoa, 58, 466 ; as illustrating the 
transition from ' natural man ' to 
society, 121 f. 

Providence, 380, 479 

Purgatory, 406 

Rashdall, G. H., on Optimism, 321; 
on pre-existence of souls, 404 

Realism, physical, 5 ; the passing of, 
17; 'Natural Realism,' 260 

Realm of Ends, the, contrasted with 
the Realm of Nature, 2 f., 304 ; in what 
sense out of time, 305 f. ; society and 
the individual in, 386 f. ; its End, 

Reason, an ideal, 23 ; implies ' objecti- 
vity,' 122 f. ; primacy of the practical, 
198, 412 f. 

Reflex action, 465 

' Regeneration,' recognised as a mystery 
by Kant and Schopenhauer, 298 

Reid, Thos., his criticism of the Cartesian 
'theory of ideas,' 259; compared fore- 
knowledge with memory, 311 



Inaex 



489 



Richter, Jean Paul, quoted, 329 
Ritchie, D. G., quoted, 129, 146 
Rosenkranz, K. , on the ugly in Nature, 86 
Rothe, R., quoted, 374, 410 
Royce, Prof. J., 129 n.\ on the indi- 
vidual as known, 297 ; foreknowledge 
of the unique and the free impossible, 
but not eternal knowledge, 312-5; 
on death, 410 

Schelling, on Hegel, 143 ; on Nature, 
143 ; his Abfall der Idee adopted by 
Hegel, 164 
Schiller, Dr F. C. S., quoted, 472 
Schopenhauer, 198 ; absolutely neces- 
sary being, absurd, 226; laudation 
of Priestley, 287 ; his doctrine of 
freedom, 292-5, a misapplication of 
Plato's theory of ideas, 299 ; on 
optimism, 321 ; on pleasure and pain, 

322 f.; on will as insatiable want, 

323 f.; on the category of substance, 

39 2 

Science, tends to eliminate qualitative 
variety, 4, 65 

Self-conservation, 21, 52 f. ; of the 
Absolute, 2 1 6 f. 

Selfishness, and extra-social sanctions, 
132, 422; and social sanctions, 132 f. 

Self-love, its objective implications, 
343 f. ; the subjective implications 
of the ' extra-regarding propensions ' 
it presupposes, 344 f. 

Sensation, pure, 256; in what sense it 
has a meaning, 259 n. 

Sensationalism, ignores creative syn- 
thesis, 105 ; denies the reality of 
self, 289 f. ; its shortcomings, 290 f. 

Sidgwick, H., on Hedonism, 340-8; 
on the 'theistic hypothesis' as in- 
dispensable to perfect ethics, 422 

Sin, the doctrine of original, 363, 369 f. ; 
meaning of, 370 f. 

Singularism, 24, 201, 228, 271, 432; 
of the Eleatics, 46, 47 ; predominant 
in the 19th century, 49 

Smith, Adam, on the rise of conscience, 
366 

Society, analogies with organism, n7f. ; 
its continuity of a higher order, 117, 
387 ; nominalistic and realistic views 
of, 118-20, the result of 'creative 
synthesis,' i2of. ; as over-individual, 
129^ , 440; wider than the state, 
130 ; society and selfishness essentially 
opposed, 132 f. 

Socratic paradox concerning virtue and 
vice, 376, 377 



Sorley, Prof. W. R., quoted, 350 
Souls, as dominant monads, 195-6; 
pre-existence of, 205, 404 f. ; tradu- 
cianism and creationism as theories 
of their origin, 205, 404; things per 
se or subjects, 391 f. 
South, Robert, on Man before the Fall, 

3 6 2, 363 

Spencer, H., quoted, 27; referred to, 
37 ; laid stress on equilibration, 101 ; 
his absolute ethics, 113; on the 
beginning of evolution, 265 ; and the 
defects of the decimal system, 355 

Spinoza, for, everything conative, 21, 
431 ; his Acosmism, 25, 33, 47 ; all 
determination, negation, 244, 355 ; 
on blessedness and virtue, 409 

Spiritualism {see also Monism), not 
necessarily theistic, 25 

Spontaneity, 14, 51, 79, 279, 328 

Statistics, moral and physical compared, 

65 f-; 433 

Stern, Dr L. W., his Person und Sache, 
157 n.\ on the dissipation of energy, 
203 f. 

Stewart, Dugald, on divine prescience, 
316 

Structure, determined by function, 
106 f., 397; this evident in human 
affairs, 107 

Subjective Selection, 75 f., 115 

Substance, category of, 391, 392 ; in- 
adequate for mind, 391 

' Sympathetic rapport, ' 2 1 8 f . , 2 5 3 f. , 
256 f., 259, 463 f., 466 

Tennant, Dr F. R., The Origin of Sin, 

quoted, 369 n. 
Tennyson, on divine self-limitation, 316 
Theism, transcends the upper limit of 
Pluralism, 192 f., 436; its superiority, 
228-30, 241 ; does not admit of 
theoretical proof, 230, but yet has a 
theoretical value, 23of. ; God as 
transcendent and immanent, 234 f.; 
how distinguished from Absolutism, 

241 ; yet it tends to pass over into it, 

242 ; and evolution, 266-9. i^ ee God) 
Thomson, Prof. J. A., his Science of 

Life quoted, 58 ; on the insect's 
wings, 84 
Time and the temporal, 133 f., 141 ; the 
phenomenal as filled time, 303 ; 
abstract time, 305, lacks what we 
experience in duration and change, 
305 f. ; the scheme of time, how 
obtained, 306; as illusory, 151 f., 
473 f - 



490 



Index 



Trinity, doctrine of the, Hegel on, 
160-77; Martensen on, 190; and 
pluralism, 190 

Uniformity of Nature, a postulate, 12 
Unity, as category, 11; ' the higher 
unity' as pluralistic ideal, 117, 435, 
the realisation of this, 136 f. 

Value or Worth, 18, 109, 131 n., 282, 
3°4> 393» 4H. 4 2 5 5 eternal values, 449 

Variations, biological, and experience, 
209 n. 

Voltaire, ignored evolution, 268 

Voluntarism, 198 f. 

Voluntary Action, analysis of, 283-91 ; a 
man's volitions and his nature, 286-9 

Wallace, Dr A. R., Man not the result 
of Natural Selection, 91 f., 187 f. ; 
denies plurality of worlds, 183 ; the 
beautiful in Nature as implying 
'superior control,' 189 



Wallace, W., on optimism and pessi- 
mism, 321 f. 

Windelband, Prof. W., his summary of 
Hegel's Phenomenology, 178 

World, the, its meaning, 419-23; but 
has it one? 419 f.; and if so, do we 
know it ? 420 ; it is the moral ideal, 
420 f. ; but is this realisable ? 42 1 ; 
it is, if we postulate God and a 
future life, 421 ; as Realm of Ends, 
444-8 

Wundt, W., on heterogony of ends, 
79; on creative synthesis, 104; on 
'increase of spiritual energy,' 280; 
' philosophy proves the necessity of 
faith,' 423 

Young, Prof. C. A., his Text-book of 
Astronomy quoted, 95 

Zeller, on Hegel's Philosophy of History, 

16 
Zollner, his pampsychism, 63 n. 



Cambridge: printed by john clay, m.a. at the university press 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

NATURALISM AND AGNOSTICISM 

The Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of 
Aberdeen in the years 1896-1; 



2 vols. 3rd edition, 1906. 
London: A. AND C. BLACK. 



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027 331 854 9 



